Forum:Licensing update June 19, 2009


 * Summary: Most Wikia sites to transition to a Creative Commons license this week.

The text of most Wikia wikis is available under a free content license called the GFDL. This license was chosen because it was the license that Wikipedia used. The latest version of the GFDL gives Wikia the option of making a one-time transition to the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License.

A vote by Wikipedia and its sister projects showed almost 88% of editors were in support of the change. Following previous discussion on Wikia, everyone was supportive of such a change, and it was noted that some wikis have requested the ability to opt out. With this in mind, I will be switching all Wikia sites to Creative Commons this Friday.

Advantages

The Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License essentially gives everyone the same freedoms that the GFDL does; the content can be used for any purpose, derivatives must be released under the same free license, and attribution must be given. The license is simpler to use and easier to understand, and has been translated into many languages. The switch means Wikia sites can continue to share information with Wikipedia and with each other. It also opens up many new possibilities for sharing content with other sites that are under a compatible Creative Commons license. Creative Commons content can be found using Creative Commons search which includes results from a few places including Yahoo CC search and Google CC search.

What happens next?

Licensing will replace the old Copyrights page.

Wiki settings will be updated by staff so that links in the footer and other places say CC-BY-SA instead of GFDL and so that links point to Licensing instead of project:copyrights. Where pages such as MediaWiki:Copyrightpage exist, they will be manually updated. A bot will add a note to the top of any project:copyrights page that exists noting that the page is deprecated and may now be out of date.

If you would like to help, you can remove old text from Project:Copyrights and instead link to Licensing. If MediaWiki:Licenses exists, it can be updated if needed, though this is not essential. Speakers of languages other than English are welcome to translate the page at Licensing and link to those translations so long as they contain a prominent notice that the English version takes precedence. Messages such as MediaWiki:Edittools or MediaWiki:Lastmodified should not be used for copyright information. If these exist on your wiki, check them to make sure they only contain what they're meant to.

More information


 * This change does not affect ownership of the content.
 * This only affects wikis that are already under the GFDL.
 * All admins will be notified via a talk page message.
 * Any wiki that wants to continue using the GFDL should leave a message here.
 * This affects only text, not images which are already under a variety of different licenses.
 * More details can be found in the previous discussion at Forum:Licensing update and in Wikimedia's blog post.
 * Dual or multi-licensing is neither required nor recommended, but any wikis that want to do this or that require other custom settings should post here.
 * The full text of both licenses can be found at GFDL and CC-BY-SA (CC summary here)

Questions

If you have any questions, please add a section below.

Angela (talk) 00:20, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

=Comments=

More on images
I understand that images can be of others licences, but, on the french wikis i started, the default licence for images is (was) GFDL (not talking about the load of fair use images on fr.guildwars). I think reordering some lines in the file licence selection drop down menu so future files could have the new licence as default could be a good idea. What do you think ? — TulipVorlax 02:10, 18 June 2009 (UTC)


 * It's up to each wiki what they do about images, but I'm happy to make changes to default license drop-down to provide a better default upload license. Angela (talk) 02:22, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

Template:Wikipedia
That and similar templates will need rewording. Can we all just copy from Starter Wikia? — Robin Patterson (Talk) 02:33, 18 June 2009 (UTC)


 * I have just updated w:c:starter:Template:Wikipedia. Let me know if you find other examples. For wikis that have never edited that template, it should be reasonably easy for us to overwrite with a bot. Angela (talk) 03:03, 18 June 2009 (UTC)

FFWiki Licensing
The staff of the Final Fantasy Wiki is presently a bit confused as to which licensing our wiki is under. We had assumed we were already working under the Creative Commons (CCASA) license by default, in which case this change would not affect us. We would like to know if this is true, and if so, who determined that the FFWiki was under CCASA instead of GFDL in the first place. Any other information that would help clear things up and point us in the direction we need to go to continue working under CCASA would much much appreciated. Thanks! 8 bit  04:07, 18 June 2009 (UTC)