[Wikipedia-l] Wikinews license

Sun Oct 17 02:31:38 UTC 2004

> A GNU FDL / cc-by-sa dual licensing scheme could be used for Wikinews...
But
> this would eliminate the option of re-incorporating third party
improvements
> back into Wikinews and would also make it impractical to incorporate
Wikipedia
> content into Wikinews for background content (since in both cases the
third
> party/Wikipedia users would have to agree to dual-license their work). So
what
> we really need is GNU FDL and cc-by-sa compatibility ASAP.

>  -- mav

One advantage we have with Wikinews is that the number of authors and edit
history of a typical Wikinews article is likely to be *much* smaller than a
typical Wikipedia article.  Perhaps a solution could work where all articles
are GFDL (for the sake of allowing a reuser to use a single license), but
individual articles can be dual (tri-, quad-, ...) licensed as determined by
the initial author.

Alternatively, we could just have some standard for contributors to specify
that their content is dual licensed under <<whatever>>, and let reusers sort
out the edit history.  We could specify that edits marked "minor" are
released into the public domain, and if we wanted we could even require
anonymous edits to be public domain.

There's a lot we can do with Wikinews that we can't do with Wikipedia, due
to the nature of the articles as well as historical problems with Wikipedia.
I think we should really think about this before we launch Wikinews.
Hopefully a future version of the GFDL will be much more lenient, but we
can't rely on that.

Anthony