[WikiEN-l] Citizendium's assertions about material from Wikipedia

Jossi Fresco jossifresco at mac.com
Sat Apr 14 19:23:16 UTC 2007


On Apr 14, 2007, at 12:18 PM, Jossi Fresco wrote:

> I was under the impression that once I hit the save button, the
> content I contribute to WP can only be reused under the GFDL.

<snip>
WP:C#Contributors' rights and obligations:
If you contribute material to Wikipedia, you thereby license it to  
the public under the GFDL (with no invariant sections, front-cover  
texts, or back-cover texts). In order to contribute, you must be in a  
position to grant this license, which means that either

     * you hold the copyright to the material, for instance because  
you produced it yourself, or
     * you acquired the material from a source that allows the  
licensing under GFDL, for instance because the material is in the  
public domain or is itself published under GFDL.

In the first case, you retain copyright to your materials. You can  
later republish and relicense them in any way you like. However, you  
can never retract the GFDL license for the versions you placed here:  
that material will remain under GFDL forever.

In the second case, if you incorporate external GFDL materials, as a  
requirement of the GFDL, you need to acknowledge the authorship and  
provide a link back to the network location of the original copy.
</snip>

My reading of the above is that one you submit material to WP "you  
can never retract the GFDL" and that the "GFDL is forever".

I may be missing something here, so I would appreciate some help with  
this.

-- Jossi





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