Board Thread:Support Requests - Community Management/@comment-3279487-20200311084717

Hello, I'm an Italian helper at Fandom and I'd like to offer this space to the admins of http://tekken.fandom.com/it/, https://tekken.fandom.com/fr/ and http://tekkenpedia-ita.fandom.com/it/ to talk to each others in order to solve their issues. I'm writing in English (at least trying XD ) to avoid misunderstanding since the issue involves different wikis, but you can use the language you prefer.

So, as far as I understand Alelm and Arbiteras claim that Clara0408 is copying content without permission from their wikis and they have an issue with that and also want to take that content down. Here we think lies a big misunderstanding about how licenses work on Fandom, so let's first try to explain how it works. By using Fandom, you implicitly agree on the Terms of Use and specifically on this page it's explained how licenses work on the platform:


 * "By editing or otherwise contributing to a wiki that uses the CC BY-SA license, you agree to license any text you change or contribute under the CC BY-SA license."

which means that the moment anyone publishes anything on a Fandom's wiki, they consent to release that content to the same license of that wiki which is CC-BY-SA (there might be exceptions, but let's keep it simple), and


 * "Individual wikis may not use a license other than CC-BY-SA unless it has been explicitly permitted by Fandom, Inc. Non-permitted uses of alternate licenses automatically default to CC-BY-SA."

which means that no wiki can change their license at their discretion without Fandom's explicit permission. So that being said, what does the CC-BY-SA license mean? It's a free license and to comply with that license when you copy/share/rework any content under it, you need to 1) attribute properly the original source and 2) share it with the same license.

I agree that asking permission before copying/sharing/reworking content from another wiki is good manners, but for anyone to comply to the license it's sufficient to just give proper credit to the source which can be accomplished by adding a link to the source on the page, in a note or even just in the edit summary when publishing the content and if the content is changed enough, then you cannot even consider it the same content and therefore you don't even need to give credit (although it might still be good manner to do so). You cannot really demand for that content to be taken down, if you don't like your content to be copied on Fandom then you shouldn't publish here. And this might seems unfair, but you have to understand that if every user could claim total ownership of their content, it would not be possible to collaborate on a wiki because I could alter a page made by someone else and that undermines the whole wiki philosophy of collaboration.

I saw there was also a dispute involving images, but I did not understand where those images came from or who made them. The license of the image is decided by the original author who made it, so you need to check its source. Since you all have a wiki about a videogame, chances are that most of your images are official images from that videogame, and those images are copyrighted by the company who produced it and you can use them on Fandom under Fair Use. If the image you are using is a fan art, then you have to check the license the author chose for it and use that on Fandom too. A key point here is that the user who uploads an image on Fandom is not the author of said image and does not have any say on its license unless they are also the original creator.

Tell me if I misunderstood anything or if you have any questions and you can also use this space to talk with each other and resolve any other dispute you might have. You are also welcome to ask the opinion of other helpers or, if you want a more official opinion, staff. Any other users involved with thos wikis is also welcome to express their opinion or offer an explanation.

Hope this will help! 