Special:Badtitle/NS90:User talk:Mitch Gore/St. Johns article and templates
Hi, Mitch Gore, and welcome to PortlandWiki! Thanks for all your efforts with the St. Johns article and the templates it used. I noticed the content you added was scraped from Wikipedia, but I've found during my long servitude to this beast we call PortlandWiki that the general attitude here prefers original content - just about any original content - over the use of Wikipedia content (or content hosted by other websites). So I think it's better to write original content in PortlandWiki, while still linking to the Wikipedia article if people want to read Wikipedia's version. To that end, I reverted your edit, which replaced the prior original content by PortlandWiki editors with the scraped Wikipedia article.
Definitely you'll get no argument from me that Wikipedia's article on St. Johns is currently better than ours... but hopefully PortlandWiki editors (like you or me) will, over time, beef up our article on St. Johns and we'll have an article to rival Wikipedia's... a different take on the same subject!
And as you can see, importing a Wikipedia article wholesale, templates and all, requires one to import an endless web of templates and sub-templates, and linked templates used for things it would take a team of highly trained monkeys (we humble PortlandWiki editors) several decades to decipher! Wikipedia's templates are a nightmare to import into a non-wikimedia ecosystem for that reason.
There is obviously no copyright issue with importing content and templates from Wikipedia, and it can certainly be useful in certain situations (one situation in particular is when Portland-related articles on Wikipedia are deleted for failing to meet the notability guidelines). But in most cases we find it's much easier, more personally rewarding, and more valuable to readers, to create original content whenever possible. And at PortlandWiki, we have the freedom to do that without a slew of policies and guidelines to conform to!
So happy wikiing, and if you have any questions, please send me a message!