Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-1417834-20140208041633/@comment-4811793-20140209175115

Simant wrote: So recently I was informed by wikia that the terms of the CC-BY-SA license are met by a single url to the source page on wikia, no matter where it is placed on the page or how poorly formatted. The license requires a notice that the content is being reused under the license and a link to or a copy of the license (stated multiple times, sections 4a, 4b(I)) as well as clear indications of changes made (3b).

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/legalcode

According to my conversions with Wikia, users don't have to indicate the license of the reused content or add a link to the license or indicate if changes were made.

Even wikia's own Licensing page doesn't only provide a link at the bottom: http://www.wikia.com/Licensing

" These terms are based on those of another company; the  Wikimedia Foundation ; and are used under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike License ( view authors )."

I was told about the licensing part that: "There is no particular requirement to actually link to the web page of the license at all." and that the requirement was met by the footer of the page reusing the content and the footer on the page the content is from. The footer is not a direct link to the license or a copy of it, nor is part of the page content through means such as export, the api, or the monobook skin. As to the requirement to link to a copy of the license, I did not communicate my point as clearly as I would have liked. You are correct about the need to include a link to or copy of the license, and I misspoke when I said otherwise. My main point was that every community on Wikia has a licensing notice in the footer. It links to our licensing page, which provides a brief summary of the way the licenses work on Wikia, as well as a link to both the source code of the license and the "human readable" version. This interstitial explanatory page does not present a material barrier to this particular requirment being fulfilled.

The license for the reused content is automatically specified when it imported onto a Wikia community, as the default setting is CC-BY-SA and we do not generally allow other license. There are a handful of communities that do use CC-BY-NC, and if there was a incompatibility between the licenses used that would be something we would intervene to help with.

The changes made are also noted automatically via the edit history.

While I would deinfitely agree that the most polite option is to make the link to the source material as prominent as is reasonable, the actual best practice would be to use the Export/Import tool so that when pages are reused they keep the entire edit history intact. Whenever possible, we encourage users to maintain that method of importing content. That way, the actual authors of each edit and the entire edit history of the page is preserved.

Unfortunately, there is an inevtiable gap between the best practice and minimum allowed. I appreciate that it must be frustrating to feel like your hard work is not being recognized, and we definitely welcome any further thoughts on this issue.