" 
  Thank you for the rewriting. I don't see any problems with it and have (as you'll no doubt notice) put it in place.  

 Balancing Wikipedia's requirement that we rewrite from scratch with Wikipedia's requirement that we not deviate from our sources causes headaches for quite a few people, and your question is raised so frequently that I kind of wonder if I should put something in our copyright FAQ about it. ) It's a good question. It's just not that easy to answer. Frequently, it can be at least partially addressed by the use of brief quotations from our sources when we can come up with good reasons for them.  Use of quotations must be transformative, so we have to avoid the impulse to use something just because they said it well. Very occasionally I will indulge in an ""as John Smith described it"" quote, but most of the time our quotes should (as per WP:NFC) ""illustrate a point, establish context, or attribute a point of view or idea.""  

 When looking out for close paraphrasing, I personally look for a combination of ""fragmented literal similarity"" and ""comprehensive non-literal similarity"": if we see stretches of similar language in a work that overall follows the same structure of the original, the risk of actionable ""close paraphrasing"" rises. You balance that against the creativity of either; structure is uncreative if anybody would have put the same details in the same order. Language is uncreative if it is formulaic. ""John Smith was born on 27 September, 2010, in Paris, France"" is uncreative. The more language and details you stack, though, the more likely the content is to become creative. The threshold for creativity in the U.S. (which governs us) is pretty low. When writing, I work to vary not only my language but also the organization of material. U.S. courts have found copyright violation even when none of the language of the original is retained, if the ""structure and pattern"" are similar. And, yes, it sometimes feels like reaching behind your back to touch your elbow. / Keeping the information true to our sources without following them can be a challenge. The more sources we find the better, since we're far less likely to accidentally appropriate the structure of a source if we're weaving together facts from multiple sources. 

 Happy to discuss this further, here or at a user talk page if you like, and if you feel the conversation is done, we can  or archive this, since it is no longer actively needed. )   "