Apologies for bringing up something that's inevitably been discussed to some extent before, but my search didn't really help. I have a 50 or so pages on a site that covers a fairly close knit range of topics (ie all sit under the same umbrella), but would almost certainly all have their own wikipedia pages. Whilst each page has a number of photos related to the topic (with titles), there's no real text about each topic. (If it helps, think of a site about birds - a few titled pics of each bird, no description as such.) Whilst I have neither the time, financial resources or inclination to write an article about each one, I think it would be beneficial just to have a little text about each topic. So basically, my question is, would I get penalized in google for using the article synopsis paragraph in wikipedia at the bottom of every page, just to provide a bit more info / content about the topic? I'm happy to link back to and credit the wikipedia page, I just don't want to get stung for having a whole load of duplicate content. Any thoughts on this would be greatly appreciated!
imo: one sentence being the same as your webpage wont dink you, if so then every page that said "Hello, my name is David" would be penelized, and davids a common name see what i mean?
Well Answers.com gets decent rankings and like 90% of their content is straight from wikipedia - if you give credit, and its not all of your site, you'll probably be okay
Cheers for that guys. I'd love to have the time to go the data mining path - ie read and rewrite, I just don't! Dragnskull - It'd be more than a sentence - the first paragraph or Which would be more than enough to be seen as dupe content. Although maybe the link back would help...
my advice is, if you really want to rank well, take some time to rewrite what you could get off wikipedia.