Hello Jimbo, Robert, list;
Can someone help me help Roberto? He would like to
use Wikipedia
texts in a magazine that helps people to learn English. He would
take our texts and give line-by-line translations. He is happy to
release his translations under the GNU FDL but wants advice on just
what he needs to do. What sort of notice should he put on the
articles?
...
My question is: can I use Wikipedia texts for my
purpose? I would leave the
texts unchanged but supply suitable translations and comments. Do I have to
ask for a special permission in order to do that?
If this particular use of your texts is available
under the Open Content
license, will I lose my copyright on all the translations and comments (i.
e. will they become available too under the Open Content License?).
Please see
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ACopyrights
Yes, you can use Wikipedia articles. They are licensed under the GNU Free
Documentation License, which mainly means that articles that use them also
have to be FDL-licensed. Note that the FDL does not mean that you "lose"
your copyrights, only that others will be able to copy and modify the so-
licensed text. We consider this fair: You use material we have provided,
so we ask you to give something back to the public in return (namely your
translation/additions).
You can find the full text of the license here:
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
What you need to do if you use our material is this:
1) Put a statement under the article (not the entire magazine, just the
article using the Wikipedia article) to the effect that the whole article
is licensed under the GNU FDL. Provide a link to the URL above.
2) Provide a link to the Wikipedia article.
Example notice:
----
"This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, which
means that you can copy it and modify it so long as the entire work
remains under this license. See
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html for
details. It uses material from the Wikipedia article 'Foo', which you can
find at
http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/Metasyntactic_variable."
----
You may want to provide a link to the electronic version of the modified
article as well, but we won't bother you if you don't.
Hope that helps,
Erik Moeller