 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | As of July 15, 2009 Wikipedia has moved to a dual-licensing system that supersedes the previous GFDL only licensing. In short, this means that text licensed under the GFDL only can no longer be imported to Wikipedia, retroactive to 1 November 2008. Additionally, Wikipedia text might or might not now be exportable under the GFDL depending on whether or not any content was added and not removed since July 15 2009. See Wikipedia:Licensing update for further information. |
Verbatim copying under the GFDL is one of the ways to reuse Wikipedia articles and other material. You may only use this approach for pages that do not incorporate text that is exclusively available under CC-BY-SA or a CC-BY-SA-compatible license. See Re-use of text under the GNU Free Documentation License.
For the purposes of this discussion, Wikipedia is considered to be a Collection of Documents. (An alternative interpretation could be that Wikipedia is a single Document, which invalidates the discussion on this page.) Each Document comprises:
- Title
- Title Page
- Main Text – the publicly editable text of the document.
- (potentially) History Subunit – the "page history" of the page.
- License and Copyright Statement – currently, "All text is available under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License (see Copyrights for details).".
- Inline images are not considered part of the Document, but rather are aggregated with it.
Other content, such as the sidebar links, the Wikipedia logo, and so forth, are not considered part of the Document, though you may consider them to be "cover pages" for the Document. An article's talk page is considered a separate Document. An image and its associated image description page is considered a separate Document.
A verbatim copy of a Wikipedia Document is copying that qualifies under section 2 (verbatim copying) of the GFDL. Verbatim is usually defined as "word for word".