[WikiEN-l] Free Software Magazine and Wikipedia

Tue Mar 29 05:54:38 UTC 2005

Hello,

My name is Tony Mobily. I am the Editor In Chief of Free Software  
Magazine (http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com).

Our magazine has articles about free software and free culture in  
general. All our articles are released under a free license (Cretive  
Common, GFDL or Verbatim Only) 6 weeks after the magazine is out.
I KNOW that a Verbatim Only license is hardly free, but it's our  
current option for "opinionated" articles about a specific subject.

Some of my authors told me that some of the articles would be perfect  
as follow-up articles to wikipedia entries. The beauty of this is that  
the follow-up articles themselves would be editable, and would  
therefore stay "alive".

For example he article "Format Wars"  
(http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/free_issues/issue_01/ 
focus_format_history/) would fit very neatly in Wikipedia's  
"File_format" entry.

The requirement of course would be that these article are released  
under the GFDL. That will depend on the authors, but I have talked to  
some of them already and they said that they would be happy with that.

The problem is: do you have a spot in Wikipedia (or in "Wikimedia" in  
general) for general articles such as the ones we publish? If the  
answer is "no", would it be worthwhile creating such a spot?

Thanks a lot,

Merc.

Tony Mobily
Editor-In-Chief
Free Software Magazine http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com