[Foundation-l] Licensing Wikinews

Sat Aug 6 18:26:56 UTC 2005

Jean-Baptiste Soufron wrote:

> Why don't you chose several licenses and don't you use dual-licensing?
>
>> 3) What should we do about the Wikinews projects which already have a
>> license choosed?
>
>
> They can change it, but the old content will stay under the previous  
> license. 

I thought the whole purpose for going with public domain was that 
everything could be moved to another license once the license issue was 
settled?  If it was formally placed in the public domain, there is 
nothing stopping you from "claiming the content" and putting it under 
license. (Like many dead-tree publishers try to do with PD content). 
 Moving from even CC-by-SA to GFDL is going to cause a whole bunch of 
other problems.  I think the general community attitude that some sort 
of general copyleft license should be applied, but it couldn't be 
generally decided exactly which one.

Since this is such a huge issue, the typical Wikimedia "vote for 
concensus" and then let the admins decide is not going to work in this 
situation... particularly since it has significant legal implications 
for those who have already contributed content.  I am not advocating a 
specific voting method, but this can't be the decision of just a few 
people working in a small committee.  That may have worked out when it 
was still being planned, but I think Wikinews has moved beyond that. 
 The statistics page lists almost 3800 registered users for en.wikinews, 
and Wikinews is in 14 different languages currently.  A license move is 
now a very major undertaking affecting a good number of people.  How 
many out of the 3800 current users would actually vote is perhaps 
another issue, but I'm sure you would get a good number of them.

It is nice, however, to see that this project is so successful.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning