[Foundation-l] Wikinews licensing

Thu Oct 28 17:04:42 UTC 2004

--- "Jimmy (Jimbo) Wales" <jwales at wikia.com> wrote:
> Some of this same reasoning applies to wikinews.  But for wikinews, a
> really *big deal* is compatibility with Wikipedia.  (Or, am I wrong
> about that?  How often will a news story really need to have content
> from wikipedia that exceeds ordinary fair use or quotation rights?)

Well the ability to use Wiknews content to update Wikipedia articles is more
important than using Wikipedia content in Wikinews articles (quoting and/or
framing of Wikipedia content should be enough), IMO. Wikipedia should
concentrate on background, giving Wikinews the ability to concentrate on the
news. 

That said I don't think we should abandon copyleft for any project. Thus I
support dual-licensing under CC-by-sa and FDL for Wikinews. The FDL is simply
impractical to use in a print publication like a newspaper since it would
require too much of third parties (like printing the whole license in the
paper!). They could use the cc-by-sa which basicly requires a by-line and
mention of the license (which would affect any improvements they made to the
article as well). The FDL part is just to be one-way compatible with other
Wikimedia projects. 

But the cost to third parties using Wikimedia content should continue to be the
passing on of the same freedoms we give them to others that use their
derivative works. This ensures positive feedback. 

Yes it is coercion, but it is just asking others to be as nice as we have been
to them. I don't think that is too much to ask for. All PD and attribution-only
does is give proprietary content providers a free lunch. Copyleft helps to
change the world by making sure that those who use it share their improvements.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

__________________________________
Do you Yahoo!?
Yahoo! Mail Address AutoComplete - You start. We finish.
http://promotions.yahoo.com/new_mail 