It’s easy to forget just how old Wikipedia is, compared to many of the free culture organizations on the Web. One looming example of this has always been our use of the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL).
Founded before Creative Commons, the GFDL was the only copyleft license that even came close to making our work free for others in a way that fit our mission.
But it’s never been a perfect fit. Far from it, in fact.
Clauses such as the invariant sections rule and the burden of printing both the full text of the license and a list of authors have seriously handicapped past efforts to republish works of Wikimedia projects. The GFDL is not really to be faulted for this, since it’s written with software documentation in mind, not an encyclopedia with thousands of authors.
But there’s a solution on the horizon. With the advent of Version 1.3 of the GFDL, we can now legally transition to the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license. But the choice to move to Creative Commons rests not with our non-profit, the Wikimedia Foundation. It rests with the people who have licensed their contributions: namely, you. If you’ve got more than 25 edits to a Wikimedia project before the 15th of March, please make your voice heard by voting!
More information:
- Meta: Licensing update
- Wikipedia:Comparison of GFDL and CC-BY-SA
- Wikipedia community vote on migration to CC BY-SA begins now (CreativeCommons.org)
- Wikipedians to Vote on Site-Wide Creative Commons (ReadWriteWeb)
April 14, 2009 at 6:46 am
Why 9?
April 14, 2009 at 1:17 pm
Lvova, I assume you’re asking why it ends on the 9th? Truth be told, I have no idea.
April 14, 2009 at 7:24 am
Thanks for the explanation, Steven.
There seems to be a great commitment to impartiality in the voting. But a Wikipedia editor who wants to know why we’re voting on it would have a hard time learning how much careful thought and planning has gone into getting us to this point.
I believe this is one of those things that has no downside, and should be a routine, bureaucratic update. The legal reasons for needing the community to weigh in en masse make sense, but I hope as people are voting, they are able to see the importance of making a change like this.
Steven, your blog post takes us a long way toward that goal.