[Foundation-l] Wikinews Licensing

Fri Dec 3 00:47:22 UTC 2004

I'm not active in Wikinews and I don't know whether I'll ever join -- 
but anyway, here are my 2 eurocents as regards the licensing issue:

(1)
While WP compatibility might seem like a real important and convenient 
thing, IMHO coming to that conclusion is fallacious (as in [[logical 
fallacy]]):
- WP compatibility is pretty much only needed if people want to 
DUPLICATE (ie. not rewrite) content from the WP.
- Wikinews was was expressly advertised as a project that would NOT 
simply duplicate WP content.
Thus, I believe the "requirement" for WP license compatibility is much 
less than one might think.

(2)
I would ''strongly'' argue for a public domain "license". As they say: 
Yesterday's news is used to wrap fish tomorrow. For a news site like 
Wikinews, the biggest asset will likely turn out to be an active, 
striving contributor community. Yes, a PD "license" would dramatically 
lessen Wikinews' control over content reuse, but any static copies will 
quickly become outdated and only serve as far as their archive value 
goes (real obnoxious automated content grabbing sited could be 
blocked). Users will thus figure out pretty quickly that the real McCoy 
is at wikinews.org. So little is lost by going PD and PD is what news 
should be. Any writing "for posteriority" (where you might have bigger 
concerns over content reuse) probably belongs at wikipedia.org anyway.

-- ropers [[en:User:Ropers]]
     www.ropersonline.com

On 2 Dec 2004, at 22:10, Erik Moeller wrote:

> During the brainstorming phase of the project, we ran a small straw 
> poll
> on what the preferred license for Wikinews content would be:
>
> http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikinews/License_straw_poll
>
> The content that is currently on the Demo wiki is in the public domain 
> in
> order to facilitate the migration to any other license. In the straw 
> poll,
> there is currently a small lead in favor of using dual licensing, but 
> the
> opinions on what licenses to use differ: Some think we should 
> dual-license
> as copyleft, others believe that we should allow non-copyleft uses for 
> the
> sake of simplicity. The straw poll as such is not very conclusive.
>
> If there are no objections, I will go ahead and hold a real vote on the
> issue as soon as demo.wikinews.org is moved to en.wikinews.org. 
> However,
> please note that this is a rather far-reaching decision, so Board input
> would be appreciated.
>
> Regards,
>
> Erik
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