Sorry for the horrible abbreviations in the title!
Wikipedia is in the process of deciding to go from using the GNU Free Documentation License to using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as its primary content license. One of the reasons for this move is that the GNU Free Documentation License is less flexible to use for wikipedia. More information from the Creative Commons blog:
A community vote is now underway, hopefully one of the final steps in the process the migration of Wikipedia (actually Wikipedias, as each language is its own site, and also other Wikimedia Foundation sites) to using Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike as its primary content license.
This migration would be a huge boost for the free culture movement, and for Wikipedia and Creative Commons — until the migration happens there is an unnecessary licensing barrier between the most important free culture project (Wikipedia of course, currently under the Free Documentation License, intended for software documentation) and most other free culture projects and individual creators, which use the aforementioned CC BY-SA license.
To qualify to vote, one must have made 25 edits to a Wikimedia site prior to March 15. Make sure you’re logged in to the project on which you qualify, and you should see a site notice at the top of each page that looks like the image below (red outline added around notice).
Click on “vote now” and you’ll be taken to the voting site.
For background on the migration process, see Wikimedia’s licensing update article and the following series of posts on the Creative Commons blog:
- On being a creative commoner
- Wikipedia and attribution
- Wikipedia licensing Q&A posted
- Wikipedia/CC news: FSF releases FDL 1.3
- Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses released
- DRAFT Creative Commons Statement of Intent for Attribution-ShareAlike Licenses
- Approved for Free Cultural Works
- Wikipedia and Creative Commons next steps
- Progress on license interoperability with Wikipedia
Here’s a great “propaganda poster”, original created by Brianna Laugher (cited a number of times on this blog), licensed under CC BY. See her post, Vote YES for licensing sanity!
Indeed, please go vote yes to unify the free culture movement!
