[Foundation-l] H2G2 "to be disposed of"

Tue Jan 25 09:31:31 UTC 2011

On 25 January 2011 08:50, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 25 January 2011 07:11, Nikola Smolenski <smolensk at eunet.rs> wrote:
>> It is a question however if per
>> http://www.bbc.co.uk/h2g2/help/entry_faqs#copyright and
>> http://www.bbc.co.uk/terms/#4 "In certain circumstance the BBC may also
>> share your contribution with trusted third parties*." would allow for
>> such a release.
>
> Very doubtful indeed. Wikipedia might, conceivably, be considered a
> trusted third party, but there is no way the rest of world would and
> we can't accept content that is licensed to Wikipedia only.

It would be nice if the Foundation could help out h2g2, possibly with
funding to help get set up independent of the BBC. It's such a
historic predecessor to Wikipedia, it just feels like the right thing
to do. Unfortunately because it isn't under a free licence, this would
probably fall outside our mission.

We should reach out to any researchers who choose to leave though, and
we already have a fairly good introduction page for them:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:H2g2

As that page says h2g2 researchers retain copyright to their own
entries, so if they want to relicense individual ones for use on wiki
projects, that's fine.

Pete / the wub