To take maximum advantage of Wikipedia’s migration to CC Attribution-ShareAlike, other wikis licensed under the GFDL should, where possible, migrate to CC BY-SA before the deadline set by the GFDL version 1.3 — August 1st.
Ideally all works under free (as in freedom) licenses should be freely remixable, greatly increasing the pull of the Free universe. Wikipedia’s adoption of CC BY-SA goes a long way toward that goal, and each additional wiki that can migrate by the deadline helps even more.
Benjamin Mako Hill (Wikipedian, Free Software Foundation board member, and one of the people crucial to making the migration possible) writes on the Wikimedia Foundation mailing list:
As the group with the most to lose and as the group that introduced the change at issue, the foundation and its broader community should devote as much time as possible to this issue in the next two months before it is too late.
I’m happy to see that work is already being coordinated here:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update/Outreach
As many people as possible should join in this effort and spread the word.
Here are some ways you can help:
- Know of a GFDL licensed wiki not on the outreach list? Add it.
- Participate in one of the wikis on the list? Help that wiki migrate, even just by alerting its community to the importance of migration.
- Want to volunteer to help but aren’t sure where to start, or have other questions? Leave a note on the outreach talk page.
- Spread the word about this effort to others who might be able to do one of the above.
It’s also worth noting that the outreach page calls out Appropedia as an example to follow. Appropedia actually took advantage of the GFDL 1.3 to migrate to CC BY-SA before the Wikipedia community vote concluded, and is an excellent and innovative wiki and community unto itself, focusing on appropriate technology for “collaborative solutions in sustainability, poverty reduction and international development.”
Thanks to everyone who has and will help move this distributed free culture optimization procedure forward!
Thanks for the plug, Mike. We really need direct engagement with people actively working on wikis, since they’re not necessarily going to find the right announcements or blog posts and realize the implications in time.
NTS: It would be nice to embed a “call home” link in future license badges for projects, so that there’s a better-than-self-reported list of users of that license, for the purpose of updates and news such as this.
So out of curiosity, what makes the GDFL so bad? I thought it did in fact allow for remixing…
Hi Sean,
Check out the Wikimedia Licensing Update page for an explanation on the motivation for the switch:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update#Motivation
In a nutshell: CC work won’t be fully compatible with Wikipedia until the switch, and the GFDL includes potentially onerous provisions on reuse (printing out of the license, etc.)
Subject header of this blog entry is “Outreach to GFDL liensed ..”. Any chance of changing that “liensed” to “licensed” ?
EarthFurst, corrected. Thanks!