[Foundation-l] Wikiversity license

Tue Aug 15 19:58:00 UTC 2006

Erik Moeller wrote:

>On 8/15/06, Amgine <amgine at saewyc.net> wrote:
>
>  
>
>>"I now understand why the GFDL is a bad license." Eben Moglen,
>>Wikimania 2006
>>    
>>
>
>Which doesn't mean that it cannot be improved. There's a real effort
>underway to do so.
>
>I'm not sure GFDL is the best license for Wikiversity. It depends on
>the amount of content mixing with other projects that is desired. I
>suspect that imports from other projects will be likely to create
>educational materials of different kinds, such as instructional
>devices embedding Wikipedia articles. From that perspective, the
>compatibility advantage of GFDL could be a compelling argument.
>
>I do agree that the Wikiversity community should discuss the issue, in
>a similar way it was discussed on Wikinews after the project was set
>up.
>
>Erik
>  
>
I will say that by its nature Wikiversity is going to be mixing content 
from all of the Wikimedia projects (including presumably Wikinews as 
well at some point).  In this regard, I would suspect that Wikiversity 
should remain GFDL for this reason alone.

The other huge issue is that most of the Wikiversity content was started 
on Wikibooks under the GFDL, and by abandoning the GFDL it is also 
abandoning all of the effort that went into Wikiversity on Wikibooks. 
 That is a considerable amount of content and not something to be 
discarded lightly.  This isn't like Wikinews that didn't have 
substantial content already developed prior to its creation.

This is, however, one reason why I think the license issue on the 
incubator ought to be discussed, as going from the GFDL to another 
license can't be done.  At the very least the incubator ought to be 
dual-licensed or have some more thought put into it in that regard.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning