Is it acceptable to copy tag descriptions from other StackExchange sites

Question

I browsed the tags today and realised there are few descriptions added.

For svg I looked at the description on StackOverflow and (of course) it is relatively complete, just not e-book specific. I started with copying that description (and the one-liner), thinking that updating it with e-book specific information is better than re-inventing the wheel from scratch. I indicated the source at the bottom of the description.

Is that acceptable? Should I always immediately add e-book specific information (in this case that EPUB 3.0 supports SVG), or is it OK to have the (of course valid) basics so it can be improved upon later on?

Answer 1

If you think it's appropriate, you're probably a good judge of that. There's no inherent problem with copying and modifying tag wikis from existing sources. If some other members find the tag wikis you create less helpful, then they can flag them or edit them themselves.

I'm not suggesting that we start copy-pasting en masse from Wikipedia (primarily, because I don't think the result would be very good). But as long as you're actually going over the content you're copying, making sure it's appropriate for ebooks.SE, and modifying when necessarily, then using existing resources is perfectly fine.

Answer 2

There are 2 parts to the answer - meaningful and legal:

1. If you copy a tag wiki, it PROBABLY won't be a great wiki for your site. A tag wiki should explain how the tag and the questions in it relate to the site's purpose, among other things. So usually, to get a good Wiki, you would need to edit what you copied anyway.

2. Legally, most free content (Wikipedia, and IIRC Stack) require you to attribute the source you copied from. So you can copy (ideally, with tweaks and improvements) but you should add an attribution if you retain a large chunk of what you copied.