Hello,
The relicensing process is underway. This means we have only 2 months
to help GFDL wikis that want Wikipedia compatibility to follow suit.
The clause that allows GFDL wikis to be relicensed to CC-BY-SA 3
expires on August 1 of this year.
I am crossposting this from the licensing thread on foundation-l
because it is important and time sensitive.
While the intent behind the August 1 sunset clause provision was to
"offer[] all wiki maintainers ample time to make their decision", this
has not yet worked out in practice. Many GFDL-licensed wiki
maintainers haven't looked at GFDL 1.3, aren't fully aware of
Wikipedia's decision to relicense, and have no idea there are hard
deadlines involved; nor have they though through the implications for
their current contributions to / reuse of Wikipedia. (I myself had
plans to organize an import of Medpedia content into WP before
realizing that this is not possible unless they choose to relicense --
even though as of today both are GFDL wikis.)
Please help add to the list and contact those that you know:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/GFDL_relicensing
A selection of large GFDL wikis that have not confirmed plans to
change their licenses:
Enciclopedia Libre
PlanetMath
Sourcewatch, congresspedia
the International Music Score Library Project
实用查询Wiki (ReferenceWiki, cn.18dao.net)
湖北百科 (wiki.027.cn)
WikiZnanie
Medpedia, WikiDoc
WikiTimeScale
Vikidia
I've seen a few short discussions on Wikia wikis, but nothing
conclusive... any updates there?
Smaller wikis are more likely to be unaware of the relicensing
decision or implications... and more likely to have been swayed by
"the license Wikipedia is using" when making their initial decision.
There are hundreds of them with great educational material, more than
the dozens listed on meta so far. In particular, I expect there are
many more Chinese, German, Japanese and Russian wikis out there... I
hope we can manage to reach most of them.
Recently Robert Rhode said:
> The migration is an incentive to other sites to also relicense.
> Given that, it behooves us to get moving early enough that other sites
> will also have time to react before the deadline. Seeing the changes
> we make will also give them a blueprint to what they may need to do.
> Incidentally, the news coverage of this event so far has been quite
> limited, which makes it more important that we have an outreach effort
> to communicate what is happening to other GFDL projects that may wish
> to change.
The second point makes sense. We do need more outreach; a long-term
sitenotice for anons would be appropriate -- with links to how to
relicense your own wiki, and what this means for reuse of Wikimedia
material / importing your own into an article.
Mainstream press coverage would be nice - perhaps after seeing which
other large wikis are planning to switch as well.
SJ
--
* to be precise, when the license switch takes effect in mid-June,
externally-sourced GFDL content will be made retroactively
incompatible with Wikimedia projects back to November 2008. We have
until August 1 to show partner sites how to relicense so that we
remain compatible.
On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 4:16 PM, Ting Chen <wing.philopp(a)gmx.de> wrote:
> Amir Elisha Aharoni wrote:
>> On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 21:09, Yoni Weiden <yonidebest(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>>> The question is - shouldn't there be one set of standards for all
>>> Wikipedias?
Perhaps for issues so important that they demand standardization. We
roughly try to do this for truly core policies, legal updates, &c.
Are TV-program-episode notability guidelines are one of those highly
important standards? I'm not so sure.
>> I do think that there should be one set of standards for all
>> languages. But it may be hard to enforce it on an existing community.
>
> No, because we are not able to reach a concensus across all the language
> communities. Thus each project community should reach their own
> concensus. Personally I find this diversity also a very good thing
> because one can always get ideas from other projects, good ones to
> follow, bad ones to avoid or to change.
Yes. I do think that over a longer period of time good policies for
which there is some benefit to standardization can become standard for
the larger global community. We should probably have a more definite
process for this. So far it hasn't been a critical issue (though
freeness of images has made as good an argument as any discussion I've
seen so far).
>> implications, but it is next to impossible to enforce Notability or
>> Verifiability policies.
Again, this is also true within one project. It is only 1-2
magnitudes harder across projects, not necessarily different in
quality. [this process would be easier if the cross-wiki policy
pageson meta were clearer and easier to add to, it is true. I copy
the underused wikimediameta list for the sake of propriety...]
>> Few he-wikipedians care about it, but he.wikipedia did quite well for
>> several years without a clear written policy on any of the following:
>> Living People, Notability, Original Research and Verifiability. All
>> decisions on these matters are made ad hoc. To our friends from
>> en.wikipedia it must seem surreal :)
>>
> No, this is the ideal state. Actually I don't like written rules. Rules
> are dead things and often they don't really fit to the actual situation.
> If one can discuss every case and reach a concensus without a fix rule
> this is for me the best case. But this only works in a relatively small
> community and doesn't fit a very big and diverse community.
+1 (this is true whether the unwritten rules are 'across many wikis'
or just 'for your one wiki'... or just understood among editors in a
given subject area.)
SJ