User talk:Mahinat

This user is a student editor in University_of_Hawaiʻi_at_Mānoa/Indigenous_Nations_and_Problems_of_Soverignty_(Fall_2019) .

Welcome!

Hello, Mahinat, and welcome to Wikipedia! My name is Shalor and I work with the Wiki Education Foundation; I help support students who are editing as part of a class assignment.

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If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact me on my talk page. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 16:36, 30 August 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Copyright

Hi! I have a quick note for you. I received a notification that you'd copied material from another source, posing a possible copyright or plagiarism issue. Looking over the material, this doesn't seem to be a plagiarism issue - rather just one of copyright. The issue here is that while this was created for a government organization, Hawaii does not put its work into the public domain and looks like it uses a fairly restrictive copyright overall. This means that we can't copy material from it unless we're copying it to use as a quote. Copyright is one of those things that is really, really weird and tricky.

Even with the Federal government there are some catches to the whole public domain content. For example, a contractor working for the government creates several documents. If they were a formal employee of the government those documents would be in the public domain. However since they're a contractor the copyright status of the documents would depend greatly on how their contract is written - sometimes it's written in a way that gives all rights to the government and sometimes it's not. That tricky nature of government work is why I tend to try to re-write stuff in my own words unless I'm very sure that it's in the public domain or under a compatible Creative Commons license.

I hope this helps! Don't worry if this all sounds odd - copyright is definitely something that doesn't always make a lot of easy sense. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 14:26, 10 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]

Ceded lands

Hi! I received a notification that some of the content you posted was taken from another source. It looks like this is pretty much a false positive, as one is a quote and the other is so specific that I don't really think that there are a lot of ways to rephrase the material, but just be careful about this and try to rephrase things in your own words whenever possible. Shalor (Wiki Ed) (talk) 17:51, 12 November 2019 (UTC)[reply]