Hello,
I'm stuck in transation of the licensing update meta page into the Polish language, and I am pretty sure I will be unable to handle questions from the community regarding understanding of the "externally contributed content" as used in the proposed terms and conditions.
There is some confusion regarding the term "third party" on the meta page as well. This has been raised on a talk page already:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Licensing_update#Proposed_terms_of_use
Specifically, this point from the meta page:
"2. to require continued dual-licensing of new community edits in this manner, but allow content from third parties to be under CC-BY-SA only;"
Reading new terms and conditions one could have impression that we create two categories of contributors:
- wikimedia community is bound to dual-license their contributions - some third parties are allowed to use CC-BY-SA only.
I find this very confusing and most probably this is not an intended effect.
Erik responded with "A very good point; I agree that we should try to come up with a good definition of what "external" means here."
I think this point is critical to our understanding how of what is the actual future licensing of the contributed content. If we don't clarify, why we need those two categories of contributions (and contributors!) and, if we need them, we clearly explain the distinction between them - this is going to be a very bad change.
I personally find it very disturbing to have it unclear while the vote is underway already and I don't like "We'll clarify this later, just do vote now" attitude.
-- << Marcin Cieslak // saper@system.pl >>