Andre Engels wrote:
If this is true, I find it quite worrying - I have put material on Wikipedia that I have also published elsewhere. Does this mean that it can be claimed this other publishing goes against Wikipedia's copyright?
As far as I know, I have not signed away my copyright on the material I submit to Wikipedia. In my opinion, this means that I still hold the copyright of the pieces I have written, although the corporation is the copyright-holder of the site as a whole. I have not given up copyright, I just restricted my rights as the copyright holder by:
- Putting the material under a Free Documentation License
- Allowing any type of publishing and changing that one could reasonably expect be done to a Wikipedia entry
I think that this view is essentially correct.
As an author, you retain the right to do anything at all with what you have personally written, including publishing the articles in another forum, another form, etc., etc. You can even put your own articles together in a proprietary book or website.
Other people, who find your work at Wikipedia, must use it subject to the Wikipedia license, which is the GNU FDL as applied to wikipedia.
I think that everyone agrees, uncontroversially, with the spirit of what is to be done. I think that the following points are uncontroversial, and how to make sure all this fits the license is a separate question.
1. Authors can continue to do anything they like with their own work.
2. Wikipedia functions as it does now, i.e. with a revision history kept for working purposes, but not with any particular concern for authorship or historical record keeping.
3. 3rd parties (i.e. not the author, and not wikipedia itself) can take and use the content in pretty much any way, but must adhere to the "invariant section" rule that they link back to the project (in html media) or credit the project (in paper media, for example). We want Yahoo to take our encyclopedia and republish it as the "Yahoo Knowledge Base" or whatever, but to have every page link back to us.