[Foundation-l] Citizendium License (Was: [EWW] EditWikipediaWeek)

[Brian McNeil]

I agree completely, there would be a lot of work putting templates in the
right places. For Wikinews every article written before the changeover had
to have a template added.

Assuming Wikibooks were to say they wanted to change license you'd have a
big project on your hands because people wouldn't want their GFDL stuff to
become frozen in time and cease being edited. If they accepted the reasons
for the license change you'd be rewriting your books to put them under the
new license.

Wikibooks could make a switch, but it would be a real challenge. I can
imagine having some pages started before the cut off having warning
templates that contributions are GFDL but there's a
start-from-scratch-and-rewrite version under CC-BY-2.5 [[here]]. Tricky
judgement call on when you switch the main article with the sub-page and
move to a template that says "This book is CC-BY-2.5, an older version under
the GFDL license is available [[here]]." This may sound overly complex, but
in line with Wiki philosophy I hate seeing useful information destroyed.

Of course, I am unaware of any drive within Wikibooks to change the license.
I guess what I and several other people on the list are saying it is they
are the only obvious case that could pull the same move as Wikinews. And
yes, it would be a disruptive, difficult and messy period for the project.


Brian McNeil

-----Original Message-----
From: foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org
[mailto:foundation-l-bounces at lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of Andrew Gray
Sent: 21 November 2007 13:34
To: Wikimedia Foundation Mailing List
Subject: Re: [Foundation-l] Citizendium License (Was: [EWW]
EditWikipediaWeek)

On 21/11/2007, Brian McNeil <brian.mcneil at wikinewsie.org> wrote:

> Were you, for example, to want to go that way with Wikibooks you'd need to
> say, okay cut-off is <date-A>, and every book started before that gets a
> template added saying it was started before <date-A>, thus remains under
the
> GFDL.
>
> I can't see any way to do that on Wikipedia where virtually every article
is
> treated as a work in progress.

Quite - even were you to try saying "all articles created after Date X
are License A, all articles created before are License B", you'd
immediately run into trouble with people wanting to merge or transfer
material across.

It really depends on how granular the projects are - how much each
page or group of pages stands on their own. It seems like this ought
to be workable for Wikibooks, to deem that this book is CC-BY and that
one GFDL...

...*but* even if it is theoretically practical, it's going to be a
hellishly big headache to administrate!

Licenses are really something that needs to be established on a
project-wide level, I fear.

-- 
- Andrew Gray
  andrew.gray at dunelm.org.uk

_______________________________________________
foundation-l mailing list
foundation-l at lists.wikimedia.org
Unsubscribe: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/foundation-l