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Wikipedia to be Licensed Under Creative Commons

Posted by Zonk on from the i'm-betting-it-was-kind-of-a-dorky-party dept.

sla291 writes "Jimmy Wales made an announcement yesterday night at a Wikipedia party in San Francisco : Creative Commons, Wikimedia and the FSF just agreed to make the current Wikipedia license compatible with Creative Commons (CC BY-SA). As Jimbo puts it, 'This is the party to celebrate the liberation of Wikipedia'."

3 of 188 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Strange... by moosesocks · · Score: 4, Insightful

    RMS is an idealist, whilst the people behind the CC organization are pragmatists.

    I'll concede that both sorts of people are necessary, although I certainly know which one I'd put my money behind.

    --
    -- If you try to fail and succeed, which have you done? - Uli's moose
  2. Re:Good luck with that.... by Jay+L · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Trust me when I say that the shit has just hit the proverbial fan right now...I'm going to have to unsubscribe...my contributions may be removed from Wikipedia

    I don't know if you're a big muckety-muck in the Greater Wiki Community; maybe you are, in which case I risk making a huge ass of myself. (I tried Googling for you, but all I kept coming up with was your many UserPages.) And, of course, it's always sad when people feel slighted or disenfranchised. That said:

    I feel fairly certain that anyone who, by comparison to his own views, considers Richard Stallman and the FSF to be a bunch of money-grubbing, compromising, unprincipled corporate hacks is someone whose writing I'm not going to miss.

  3. Re:Difference? by Teancum · · Score: 4, Insightful

    GFDL requires that so-called "Invariant Sections" (talking about the author and their relationship to the subject matter) be carried forward into future versions unchanged. Wikipedia articles don't have Invariant Sections, but you could take a Wikipedia article, change it, and then add an invariant section; everybody who wanted to use your changes would then have to keep the invariant section intact.

    GFDL also requires that the title of the work be changed after every modification, and that sections titled "Acknowledgment" and "Dedication" be kept intact. Nobody really cares about these clauses, and Wikipedia has long ignored them.


    If you add an invariant section, the legal requirement for keeping those invariant sections is only to those whom you distribute that new version of the content after this modification. It doesn't apply to earlier versions...and Wikipedia would as a matter of custom delete any invariant sections and material that would have to be kept.

    But on the whole, you are largely correct that Wikipedia does ignore this section of the GFDL by simply prohibiting as a matter of policy the creation of any invariant sections. There may be some GFDL'd content that was added to Wikipedia which contained invariant sections... and that content would either have to be deleted, or be in technical violation of the terms of the GFDL. The problem here is that there is, comparatively speaking, so little actual content outside of Wikimedia projects written using the GFDL that this is usually not a problem for copyright violation situations.

    If you want to redistribute a (modified) version of a work, the GFDL also requires that you accompany it with a copy of the GFDL and list at least five of the principal authors of the work on its title page. That's also widely ignored, by Wikipedia and others.


    I've complained about how the terms of this requirement might actually be met using the current interface on Wikipedia and the MediaWiki software. All of the raw information necessary to meet this requirement is kept on the servers, but it is not very easy to access and a pain to try and obtain. There is also no simple mechanism to distinguish between a vandal whose edits have been completely removed, and a serious contributor who has added some very real meat to the articles. Most lists of authors on Wikipedia articles include not only the "principal authors" but also vandals, crackpots, sysops (who clean up the mess from vandals), and people stopping by to fix the spelling of just one or two words.

    The GFDL is also very weak in its formal definition over what might even constitute an author at all, and it is very possible that Willy on Wheels (look it up on Wikipedia if you don't know him) could get equal credit with RMS on the article regarding the Free Software Foundation. But that is a problem with the GFDL, not Wikipedia.

    This is, however, something I've paid careful attention to when I've distributed Wikimedia content outside of the Wikimedia projects themselves. And that is something I have done... not just talked about.