Wikipedia Moving From GFDL To Creative Commons License

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."

Comments

For those playing at home

[tepples]

Like the GNU Free Documentation License, the Creative Commons Attribution ShareAlike license is a free, copyleft license designed for works other than computer programs. It just lacks some of the practical problems that come with the GNU FDL, which was designed specifically for software manuals that run dozens of pages long. Individual encyclopedia articles are much shorter than that, and the ability to incorporate the license by reference is a better match for Wikimedia Foundation's uses. But the Creative Commons licenses have some of their own practical problems, such as requiring distributors to remove an upstream author's credit upon request.

Re:For those playing at home

[buchner.johannes]

GNU FDL was chosen as CC was not available at the time. Now CC has additionally become an accepted standard with a lot of material out there. It is great news as this makes it easier to mix content from and to their projects.

Re:For those playing at home

[Carnildo]

Was it the license that was preventing a downloadable dump of Wikipedia from being distributed on an iPhone?

No, it's the size. A text dump of the current version of the English Wikipedia (no images, no history) is 45 GB.

Re:For those playing at home

[bcrowell]

Wikipedia has a useful FAQ about the relicensing.

The parent post makes some good points about what was undesirable about the GFDL. In addition, there's the issue of needless proliferation of licenses. What everybody originally intended here was to make a commons that everyone could draw from. If A makes an animation, and B writes a song, and C performs B's song, and A, B, and C all try their best to put their work in the commons, then D should be able to come along and make a video consisting of A's animation with a sound track consisting of C's performance of B's song. There shouldn't be artificial obstacles just because A, B, and C chose different licenses.

I'm not saying there should only be one free-as-in-speech license for written materials. We do need at least two, because there are real philosophical differences between BSD-style licenses and GPL-style licenses. But there is not a real philosophical difference between the GFDL and CC-BY-SA.

Re:For those playing at home

[atomicthumbs]

Or 4.7 gigs compressed, if you only download the articles.

Re:For those playing at home

[BadAnalogyGuy]

I only read Wikipedia for the articles.

Re:For those playing at home

[Teancum]

I assume this includes all the talk pages, user profile pages, votes for deletion pages, nerd rage about pictures of a human turd and pages outlining wikipedia policies right?

This is a fair question, actually, even if it is posed in a rough AC manner.

The short answer is yes, it includes all of these other pages as well, including stuff subject to deletion and spam put on Wikipedia by vandals.

That doesn't make goatse.cx now available under the terms of the CC-BY-SA license, but it does make this page available under those terms, and any side commentaries on the topic as well, even if it is otherwise off-topic on other pages of Wikipedia.

Might I be the first to say...

[Landak]

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

Okay

[Anonymous Coward]

I just got off the phone with the big guy, you know, RMS himself. St. Ignacio or whatever.

And he's fucking pissed.

He said and I quote, "Looks like these fuckers don't know who they're dealing with. They need to be taught a lesson... freedom ain't free."

Apparently, he's planning on liberating wikipedia by force.

Re:Okay

[David Gerard]

RMS actually thinks it's a good idea :-)

Re:I didn't RTFA

[jrumney]

Wikipedia is very different from a file upload site like Flickr, in that each page is not the work of one individual, but the combined work of many. Consistent licensing is essential - noone wants to have to check all the licenses of previous edits before they add their own to ensure that no license conflict happens.

Re:I didn't RTFA

[buchner.johannes]

Is existing GFDL content compatible with the CC licence?

I think (please correct me) what they did was write a GFDL version compatible with the CC. Then they upgraded the licence of the existing content and thus now they can switch over to CC.

I'd read the article, but it's slashdotted :-[

Why can't individual contributors choose their licence like they can with Flickr?

Wikipedia is not a blog. It would become a format like urbandictionary.com or everything2.com: no rewriting and collaborating on content, rather single statements of various truthiness.

Re:Freedom Nerds

[petrus4]

It seems to me that the freedom nerds have ended up creating incompatible freedom licenses and have thus shackled themselves in such a way as to prevent them from sucking each other off.

That's a fairly accurate interpretation, yes. However, the point is that the CC licenses allow for mutual fellatio among a greater and more inclusive cross-section of nerds, while also involving less legal restrictions.

Some of us tend to view this as an extremely positive and beneficial thing, because after all, when we're talking about mutual oral sex between nerds, what's not to love?

Re:I didn't RTFA

[Carnildo]

Is existing GFDL content compatible with the CC licence?

I think (please correct me) what they did was write a GFDL version compatible with the CC. Then they upgraded the licence of the existing content and thus now they can switch over to CC.

Close: Wikipedia was licensed under the GFDL version 1.2 or later. What the FSF did was write version 1.3 with a clause saying that any GFDL-licensed wiki (with safeguards to prevent license-washing) could be re-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license 3.0.