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Welcome to this non-exhaustive beginners guide on how to help with copyright cleanup across Wikipedia, and thank you for wanting to help. This guide will go through the basics in helping at Contributor Copyright Investigations and CopyPatrol.

The Basics

What is copyright cleanup?

Copyright cleanup is the act of removing copyright violations ("copyvios"), from Wikipedia. On the English Wikipedia, this is almost entirely removing or rephrasing copyrighted text, though it can also involve images, videos and other media.

Why do we need to remove copyrighted content?

Almost all Wikimedia projects^[a] are licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license (CC-BY-SA 3.0). This license allows commercial use, and means we can only accept content released under this or a compatible license. When you contribute to Wikipedia, your contributions are released under this license. However, most sources (almost all books and most websites) are not released under a "free" license (you can tell this when it says "All rights reserved" in the footer), and Wikipedia cannot accept this content.

Jargon and abbreviations

CCI – Contributor Copyright Investigations
Copyvio – Copyright violation
Revdel – Revision deletion criteria RD1

What is and isn't allowed on Wikipedia

What is allowed

Anything released under a CC-BY(-SA) license or any compatible license
Anything in the public domain (this varies by country, for more information, see c:Commons:Copyright rules by territory)
Any copyrighted text that has been released under a free license by the Volunteer Response Team (VRT)
Text from elsewhere within Wikipedia (requires attribution, see WP:Copying within Wikipedia)

What isn't allowed

Anything released under a license that forbids commercial use
Anything released under a license that forbids derivative works (Wikipedia is editable by anyone, so this can't be enforced)
Anything where the copyright status is unclear or unknown

References

Notes

^ Except for Wikinews (Wikinews uses the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license, or "CC-BY 2.5") and parts of Wikidata (Wikidata's main, property, lexeme, and EntitySchema namespaces use the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication, or "CC0". All other namespaces use the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 license.)

[1] Except for Wikinews (Wikinews uses the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 Generic license, or "CC-BY 2.5") and parts of Wikidata (Wikidata's main, property, lexeme, and EntitySchema namespaces use the Creative Commons Public Domain Dedication, or "CC0". All other namespaces use the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike 3.0 license.)

[a]