The international language editions of Wikinews are still in beta, but some of the other language version have already moved one step closer to getting out of that state - they got a license. Now... This is not a good thing.
The Spanish, Serbian and Romanian editions are all licensed under the GNU FDL, and the Japanese edition is licensed under CC-By. That's due to the nature of the Japanese law, which, according to some juristic analysis, doesn't allow to release content into the public domain. That's not such a big problem - first of all, it might be possible to relicense the content under CC-By-SA, or simply ask the contributors to relicense it - since this is a new project, there aren't too many people to ask.
But, back to the topic. The 2.5 Creative Commons licenses allow to give the attribution NOT to every author of the article, but to the whole project - just check 4(b) of http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/legalcode (same applies to every other CC license).
This allows us to finally license our content under the CC-Wiki (that's what we could call CC-By-SA 2.5) license - now the basic questions are:
1) Do we need to license it right now? 2) Will we really choose CC-By-SA 2.5, or some other license, like GFDL or CC-By, for example? 3) What should we do about the Wikinews projects which already have a license choosed?
But, back to the topic. The 2.5 Creative Commons licenses allow to give the attribution NOT to every author of the article, but to the whole project - just check 4(b) of http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/legalcode (same applies to every other CC license).
This allows us to finally license our content under the CC-Wiki (that's what we could call CC-By-SA 2.5) license - now the basic questions are:
- Do we need to license it right now?
Well the sooner, the better...
- Will we really choose CC-By-SA 2.5, or some other license, like
GFDL or CC-By, for example?
Why don't you chose several licenses and don't you use dual-licensing?
- What should we do about the Wikinews projects which already have a
license choosed?
They can change it, but the old content will stay under the previous license.
Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:
Why don't you chose several licenses and don't you use dual-licensing?
- What should we do about the Wikinews projects which already have a
license choosed?
They can change it, but the old content will stay under the previous license.
I thought the whole purpose for going with public domain was that everything could be moved to another license once the license issue was settled? If it was formally placed in the public domain, there is nothing stopping you from "claiming the content" and putting it under license. (Like many dead-tree publishers try to do with PD content). Moving from even CC-by-SA to GFDL is going to cause a whole bunch of other problems. I think the general community attitude that some sort of general copyleft license should be applied, but it couldn't be generally decided exactly which one.
Since this is such a huge issue, the typical Wikimedia "vote for concensus" and then let the admins decide is not going to work in this situation... particularly since it has significant legal implications for those who have already contributed content. I am not advocating a specific voting method, but this can't be the decision of just a few people working in a small committee. That may have worked out when it was still being planned, but I think Wikinews has moved beyond that. The statistics page lists almost 3800 registered users for en.wikinews, and Wikinews is in 14 different languages currently. A license move is now a very major undertaking affecting a good number of people. How many out of the 3800 current users would actually vote is perhaps another issue, but I'm sure you would get a good number of them.
It is nice, however, to see that this project is so successful.
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org