Attribution

From Meta, a Wikimedia project coordination wiki

This page documents attribution.

When copying page content that anyone besides you contributed to, you must provide a chain of attribution. An edit summary is sufficient. The edit summary need only contain a pointer to the source of the page content.

For example, if you wanted to create a copy of the English Wikipedia's Britney Spears page here on Meta-Wiki, you would copy and paste the content and use an edit summary when creating the page such as:

You can obtain the revision ID (in this case, "555622944") by clicking the "Permanent link" link in the sidebar.

Without this pointer, tracing page content that's been copied between wikis can be really difficult or even impossible. If you forget to use a pointer, you can always provide attribution later with a dummy edit or a post to the associated talk page.