On 29 May 2004 at 14:09, Ulrich Fuchs wrote:
It's a pity that we can't change the Wikipedia licence any more. We would need something that would allow to copy more freely within the wikis, something which is more suitable for collaborative writing. However if the content is to be taken "outside", authors should be named as indicated by the version history.
Uli
One partial solution is to have contributors grant a license to license under the GFDL. We have a modest proposal at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Submission_Standards ...
First, "by contributing to Wikipedia you grant Wikipedia users a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive right and license to edit your text on Wikipedia. You agree that your submission may be changed, modified, edited, moved, extended, deleted or combined by subsequent users of Wikipedia."
Second, "by contributing to Wikipedia, you grant the Wikimedia Foundation a perpetual, royalty-free, non-exclusive, right and license to publish your submission, before or after being modified as described above, under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)."
That doesn't permit free copying of text between wikipedia and its sister projects, but I expect addresses some concerns. It's basically how we treat submissions already - a formalisation of "edited mercilessly and redistributed at will".
-Martin