[Licom-l] Dual-licensing confusion

Fri May 29 07:58:13 UTC 2009

The position articulated in discussions at Meta (and Erik please
correct me if I misstate this), is that:

A) Wikipedians are required by the license to identify the previous
work whenever they import externally produced CC-BY-SA content.  Such
a notation should exist at least in the edit summary, but might also
be recorded elsewhere (e.g. a talk page, or whatever).  [Strictly
speaking previous work should also be identified when content is moved
between wiki articles as well.]

B) Reusers are expected to review the edit history to see whether
CC-BY-SA-only content has been imported.  And reusers bear full
responsibility for determining if that is the case and ensuring they
honor the licenses correctly.

As I understand it, that is the full scope of the requirements.

However, individual communities may choose to go further and provide
efforts to voluntarily label materials that are CC-BY-SA-only, such as
through a Category system.

-Robert Rohde

On Wed, May 27, 2009 at 11:52 PM, Samuel Klein <meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
> Many people are confused about the intent and effect of the limited
> dual-licensing that is planned.  This has been amplified by the social
> desire of people guiding the process to say two conflicting things at
> once: both "we want to support GFDL reusers, and don't want this to be
> an abrupt shift" and "one day soon the projects will be almost
> entirely cc-by-sa".
>
> We should be clear to current and potential partners that despite the
> effort through limited dual licensing to extend the availability of
> up-to-date GFDL text, it is a temporary measure.
>
> The only polite way I know of to express strong support for GFDL
> reusers is to put energy into providing them with more and clearer
> information about articles.  That is, to the extent that there are
> third-party reusers of GFDL encyclopedic material, Wikimedia could
> maintain a read-only snapshot of the latest GFDL revisions of all
> articles.  It could at the same time include a checkbox on the edit
> page for all  dual-licensed pages to indicate the inclusion of
> cc-by-sa material.  Once such material is included, the page would be
> flagged as no-longer-GFDL in the databse.  Of course the flagging user
> could be wrong, just as whoever is expected to independently
> assess/verify the non-cc-sa-only nature of every edit made since June
> 15 could be wrong.  But this would make the meaning and effect of the
> dual license provisions crystal clear.
>
> SJ
>
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