Editing Encyclopedia:Public domain resources (section)

==Caveats and notes== 
* The [[Wikipedia:Wikimedia Foundation|Wikimedia Foundation]] is based in the [[United States]] and accordingly governed by [[United States copyright law]], which tends to be broad. Still, Wikipedia contributors should respect the copyright law of other nations. (See [[Wikipedia:Copyrights]], [[Wikipedia:Non-US copyrights]], and [[Wikipedia:Copyright situations by country]]). 
* Most works prepared by an officer or employee of the US government as part of that person's official duties (see [[Copyright status of works by the federal government of the United States]]) are public domain, but that is not true of most works prepared by [[State governments of the United States|state government]] officers or employees, or to foreign governments. For example, in many countries that are part of the [[Commonwealth of Nations]], [[Crown copyright]] is standard. 
*The United States [[intellectual property]] [[law firm]] of Bromberg & Sunstein LLP (now Sunstein Kann Murphy & Timbers LLP) created a [https://web.archive.org/web/20051212050759/http://www.bromsun.com/practices/copyright-portfolio-development/flowchart.htm flow chart] in 2002 which is helpful in determining whether a given work is in the public domain in the United States. The flowchart is from 2002 and so reflects the state of the law in that year. 
*'''Please don't data dump!''' The resources below are valuable, but many are also old (with antiquated style and sometimes factual errors), dependent on context, sometimes written from biased points of view, and otherwise are not ''in themselves'' good [[encyclopedia]] articles. If you copy material from these sources, please do not simply dump it verbatim – instead, take the time to verify the accuracy of the information (by checking more recent scholarly work); [[Wikipedia:Citing sources|properly attribute the material]]; format and wikify the material (see [[Wikipedia:Manual of Style/Layout]]).
*The '''''minimum''''' that an editor must do is to tag any public domain sources dumped into the wiki with an '''attribution template'''. For example, if you include {{tl|CIA World Factbook}}, it expands into:

{{CIA World Factbook}}

See [[Wikipedia:Template messages/Sources of articles]] (note that this lists templates for both public domain and non-public domain sources) and [[:Category:Attribution templates|attribution templates]]. Attribution templates are extremely helpful to other editors; it allows them to easily locate articles that use a particular public domain source, by using the "What links here" feature on the template page.