The on-wiki version of this newsletter can be found here: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Updates/2021-12-02

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The discussion about the licensing of Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia has been going on for a few days now, and we can now see better which questions are contentious, and which ones seem to have found an early consensus.

In order to keep the discussion moving, we plan to restructure it.

We have identified the following points as having achieved a rough consensus.

1.

Everything is published under a free license. 2.

We are launching with only a single license for implementations. We *may* add the option to have other compatible open source licenses for software contributions after launch. This is a discussion for a later point. 3.

Textual content on Wikifunctions (i.e. documentations, project pages, talk pages, etc.) is all published under CC BY-SA. For the sake of consistency, we will use the 3.0 version of the CC BY-SA license at this point. 4.

Function Signatures and other structured objects (besides Abstract Content and Code Implementations) are published under CC0. 5.

Output Content has the same license as the input to the functions producing the Output Content. This means in particular that Output Content used for Wikipedia will be published under the same license as the license we choose for Open Question #2 above.

We have identified the following two questions as being the core unresolved questions:

1.

Which license should be used for code implementations: GPL or Apache? 2.

Which license should be used for Abstract Content for Abstract Wikipedia: CC BY-SA or CC 0?

I doubt that we will be able to achieve consensus on the two open questions, as they touch on a very long-running open question whether or not licenses for free content and open source should better be viral. We don’t expect, nor do we really want to moderate a discussion that has happened repeatedly in the last few decades, and that likely will not lead to many people changing their opinion anyway.

You are still free and welcome to add reasonings and to discuss on the talk page, but we would particularly like to see the vote from a large number of people on which of the two options you’d prefer, and also whether you actually care or not, as long as the content is free.

This will help us to find a decision that is aligned with the community.

To make it explicit: in case of a close outcome, we reserve the right to not necessarily follow whichever option has more comments/!votes.

Our plan is to summarize the conversation around December 15, in about two weeks' time, and then leave that for final comments and reactions, before we close the discussion on December 20.

Please join the discussion and give your !vote on Meta https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Abstract_Wikipedia/Licensing_discussion .

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We have launched the Design hub https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Abstract_Wikipedia/Design, which we will steadily expand in the coming months. It will include a variety of meeting-notes, design sketches and mockups, and reference material links that are created as part of the Design process for the user interface of Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia.

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We have uploaded the finalized logo assets for the Wikifunctions logo. You can find the assets, including a vectorized version, favicons, etc., all on Wikimedia Commons https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Wikifunctions_logos.

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Some of you already noticed that we have started working on setting up our beta cluster wiki. It is not ready for prime time yet, and we will announce it here as soon as this changes. This is also when we will post the link. For now, we hope you don’t mind keeping the link a bit hidden, as the site isn’t working properly yet.