This page is currently inactive and is retained for historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump.

Wikipedia's content is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, which allows our content to be copied and used for virtually any purpose, so long as the author is credited (and a few other small conditions). Wikipedia's database is freely downloadable. The reason we do this is to make our content reusable to third parties.

Every bit of Wikipedia related meta-data that is used in articles is one more thing that a re-user has to take out when they copy our database. To this end, it is very important that Wikipedia-related designations, so called "meta-data", be kept out of articles.

Common examples of meta-data:

• Article-related discussion
• Featured article status
• good article status
• Stub status

Talk pages were created in order to avoid having discussions of article content in the article itself. Talk pages are an appropriate place for Wikipedia-related metadata. The article itself is not.