Talk:Maryland Department of Planning: Difference between revisions

This is the Maryland Department of Planning Wikipedia Talk Page. Please comment on the content of this wiki. — Preceding unsigned comment added by JohnCMDP (talk • contribs)

I am a former employee of MDP. I believe that the text with the copyright concerns was edited by User:JohnCMDP, who I suspect is a current employee of the agency in charge of public relations. Therefore, it is quite likely that he can give permission for the use of the text. On the other hand, it may be in the public domain because the website it was taken from is owned by the State of Maryland. Chuckgates (talk) 22:38, 22 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Text from http://www.mdp.state.md.us/mdpbio.htm has been incorporated into this Wikipedia article as the User who is posting, John G. Coleman, Jr., is the Public Information Officer for the owner of the content, the Maryland Department of Planning, or MDP. MDP is an agency of the government of the State of Maryland and the text in question is in the public domain. Please direct all inquiries to: Director of Communications and Education, The Maryland Deparetment of Planning, Suite 1101, 301 W. Preston Street, Baltimore, MD 21201 or visit www.planning.maryland.gov. — Preceding unsigned comment added by JohnCMDP (talk • contribs)

And I'm the king of Romania. Or wait, am I? How can you know, given the anonymity of Wikipedia? There are ways to properly allow for copyrighted material to be incorporated into Wikipedia: please see WP:Donating copyrighted material. Merely saying "I own it and I allow it" here is not a sufficient remedy. WikiDan61^ChatMe!_ReadMe!! 20:14, 23 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

John here are some options to formally release the content on your MDP website to resolve the copyright concerns:StanfordHarvie1 (talk) 21:13, 23 September 2009 (UTC)[reply]

1. Explicitly grant permission on your MDP website with a "copyleft" notice. This means putting a tag line at the bottom saying something like ""The text of this website (or page, if you are specifically releasing one section) is available for modification and reuse under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 3.0 Unported License and the GNU Free Documentation License (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts)." -OR-
2. Contact permissions-en@wikimedia.org. See here for an example of a permissions-granting email. Then, after sending the email, place {{OTRS pending}} on the article's discussion page. Someone will reply to your email, indicating whether the content and your license is acceptable and update the page to indicate that the confirmation of the license has been received.

By the way, I applaud your efforts to add MDP to Wikipedia. I think more government agencies should do so to better educate the public on how the agencies serve citizens.