Hi!
I thought someone else with more legal knowledge would start a discussion about this. But nothing happened, so I'll do it:
Whould it be possible to dual licence the Wikipedia articles with one of the new creative commons licences? Preferably this one: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/1.0 (Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0)
It's in the spirit of the GNU FDL (copyleft), but much simpler, and I think the creative commons licences will become very important sooner or later. We should make it as easy as possible for people to use our work, as long as their's is also open content.
I guess we might be able to incorporate works under the Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0 licence, but not the other way round. But IANAL. I guess the first paid employee of the Wikipedia foundation has to be a copyright lawyer. Is there a site somewhere that explains which free/open licences are compatible with each other?
Of course it's impossible to ask everyone who has contributed to wikipedia if it's okay to dual licence their work (I'm astonished that it worked for Mozilla). But we might apply the creative commons licence to all new articles, and to articles which have been heavily edited or completely rewritten.
Kurt