DU Community Help

a reasonable first part of an article while abiding by the DU "four paragraph rule"....
and us old-timers previously understood a 'paragraph' to be comprised of
several sentences more than one short sentence....


Well, here's a hint: when faced with such a situation,
I sometimes edit out some of the paragraph breaks,
creating actual paragraphs where there were a lot of 'one sentence paragraphs',
in order to get the point across when re-posting part of an article---
making it appear that I only re-posted four paragraphs,
when the editing in the original article may have been different
(and I always include the original link, which would have exposed my editing---)

Never ran into any 'alert' trouble when I did that.

I also try to follow a personal rule of thumb to never re-post more than half of the original article
while doing such....



As the site admin Earl stated previously:
"But sometimes news articles are formatted with every sentence as a paragraph, and you can't get the gist of the article across without that fifth sentence. Sometimes an article is very long, and a six-paragraph excerpt is a smaller percentage of the article than a four-paragraph excerpt might be for a short article. There is no law that states that four paragraphs is the limit for an acceptable excerpt -- it's just an internal DU standard. So whenever we receive a copyright alert, we notify the user if it looks like they've gone too far and they could use a reminder about the policy."