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

[John Lee]

On 4/15/07, Jossi Fresco <jossifresco at mac.com> wrote:
>
>
> 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


The GFDL is non-exclusive, meaning that although you cannot retract the
licence, you can license the same GFDLed material under another licence, as
you retain the copyright to it: "You can later republish and relicense them
in any way you like." It is indeed impossible to revoke the GFDL for
material placed on WP; nobody is stopping you, however, from placing that
same material under a different licence in the future.

Johnleemk