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Wikipedia Moving From GFDL To Creative Commons License

Posted by timothy on from the please-discuss-in-the-talk-section dept.

FilterMapReduce writes "The Wikimedia Foundation has resolved to migrate the copyright licensing of all of its wiki projects, including Wikipedia, from the GNU Free Documentation License to the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License. The migration is scheduled to be completed on June 15. After the migration, reprints of material from the wikis will no longer require a full copy of the GFDL to be attached, and the attribution rules will require only a link to the wiki page. Also, material submitted after the migration cannot be forked with GFDL "invariant sections," which are impossible to incorporate back into a wiki in most cases. The GFDL version update that made the migration possible and the community vote that informed the decision were previously covered on Slashdot."

5 of 90 comments (clear)

  1. Might I be the first to say... by Landak · · Score: 4, Interesting

    ...is this the start of the end of the GFDL?

    --
    My UID is prime. Is yours?
    1. Re:Might I be the first to say... by orngjce223 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Not really, the GFDL is for things that are much longer, and y'know Wikipedia articles really aren't supposed to be very long (the one on the "United States" is about as big as they get).

      Basically, imagine the GFDL tacked onto a five-sentence stub Wikpedia article about a town in France. Then imagine the GFDL tacked onto a hundred-page software manual. It's (proportionally speaking) a pretty big difference, which makes it very practical in the latter case but not in the former.

      --
      Note: I was 13 when I wrote most of this. Take with several grains of salt.
  2. Re:I didn't RTFA by Meshach · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Good point. The original license does not account for the fluid nature of articles at wikipedia. From a legal perspective this seems like an improvement (IANAL though).

    --
    "Maybe this world is another planet's hell"
    Aldous Huxley
  3. Re:Okay by MessedRocker · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The FSF actually got the GFDL changed so that Wikipedia would be able to ditch it.

  4. Scary power.... by myforwik · · Score: 1, Interesting

    A scary amount of power is shown when places like wikipedia make you submit your work to the GFDL license AND any future versions. So it basically means they can port everyones submissions to whatever they want. One day this is going to back fire terribly. Wikipedia has always been a joke though when it came to GFDL. I used to go around and remove content that was cut and copied between pages by non original authors, because it violated the GFDL because the original authors information was not kept in the edit histories, naturally I was banned. Is anyone really ganna go though all the technicallities of the creative commons license? All the clauses it has are completely meaningless, because they can put out a new version with whatever clauses they want.