(from a fantastic series by Flickr user quartermane)
Heads up Wikipedia editors:
The world’s most-cited website is considering a change to the terms by which it makes it content available to editors. And for once, the proposed change looks pretty cool.
Wikipedia is putting to a vote whether they should migrate the license on their content from its current GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) to a Creative Commons Attribution/Sharealike (CC-BY-SA) license. The general plan is that everything licensed under GFDL will be dual licensed to CC-BY-SA, and incoming works would take just the CC license.
It’s worth noting that both Creative Commons and Wikipedia founder Jimmy Wales are in favor of the switch (as well as CC founder Lawrence Lessig). If you have edited Wikipedia more than 25 times since March 15 you have the option to vote. Click here for more info on how to do so.
In its essence, the objective here is to update the license to reflect the same level of content control (or lack thereof), but offer a license that better represents Wikipedia’s content. Also, the GFDL has some particularly cumbersome requirements, such as requiring the reprint of its entire license on every derivative work. The CC license would avoid these, easing proper use. As Wales put it in a recent Wikimedia Q&A:
When I started Wikipedia, Creative Commons did not exist. The Free Documentation License was the first license that demonstrated well how the principles of the free software movement could be applied to other kinds of works. However, it is designed for a specific category of works: software documentation. The CC-BY-SA license is a more generic license that meets the needs of Wikipedia today, and I’m very grateful that the [Free Software Foundation] has allowed this change to happen. Switching to CC-BY-SA will also allow content from our projects to be freely mixed with CC-BY-SA content. It’s a critically necessary change for the future of Wikimedia.
I don’t know enough about the GFDL to comment intelligibly on the differences, but I wholeheartedly support the CC-BY-SA license in general. I use the sister license, CC-BY-NC-SA, for everything I put up on this website, and any pictures I post are usually licensed under the same terms on Flickr and elsewhere. The biggest concern appears to be the attribution requirement, and how it will play out in action (see this Wikimedia discussion on that point). There’s also a bit of a battle brewing between Free Software Foundation fans (drafters of the GFDL) and Creative Commons fans on many of the discussion threads out there. While this would make for a fantastically geeky West Side Story spinoff, I think they’ll work out their differences.
For more intelligent discussion:
