Wikipedia Goes Creative Commons

Author: Cathy Davidson

Posted: 5/21/2009 - 10:07pm

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Press releases/Dual license vote May 2009

From the Wikimedia Foundation

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Wikimedia Foundation announces important licensing change for Wikipedia and its sister projects

Adoption of Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License willsupport greater interoperability and re-usability of Wikimedia content.The current GNU Free Documentation License will continue to besupported.

May 21, 2009

San Francisco, California -- Earlier today the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees passed a resolutionthat will bring about significant changes to the way the content of theWikimedia Foundation projects, including Wikipedia, will be licensed.This resolution follows a vote among the international Wikimediacommunity. More than 17,000 votes were cast, with strongestparticipation in English, German, French, Russian, Spanish, Polish,Italian, and Chinese. 88% of all voters who expressed an opinionsupported the change.

All Wikimedia content can be used for any purpose, as long as propercredit is given and modifications are made available under the sameterms. This open access approach to copyright is supported using alicense which explicitly grants everyone those freedoms. The decisionwill result in all of the Wikimedia Foundation's projects moving fromthe GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) to the Creative CommonsAttribution/Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA) as their primary contentlicense. The GFDL, which has served Wikipedia since its inception, willcontinue to be supported where possible, but not to the detriment ofinteroperability.

The licensing change means that all Wikimedia project content willbe more interoperable with existing CC-BY-SA content and easier tore-use. "The volunteers who work on Wikimedia projects have verystrongly supported making their contributions available under theCreative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License (CC-BY-SA) in additionto the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL)," said WikimediaFoundation Board of Trustees Chair, Michael Snow. "Updating our licenseterms will support Wikimedia's charitable mission, by making ourprojects legally compatible with others that have chosen the CC-BY-SAlicense. Our free information and educational content can be sharedmore readily and will be easier for everyone to use."

Wikipedia has historically been licensed under the GNU FreeDocumentation License, which was developed for software documentationby the Free Software Foundation, a non-profit organization founded byRichard Stallman, with a worldwide mission to promote computer userfreedom and to defend the rights of all free software users. At thetime of Wikipedia's inception in 2001, it was one of the few licensesavailable for works other than software which focused on grantingfreedoms to re-use and re-distribute information.

Since their creation in 2002, the Creative Commons licenses haveprovided a practical and simple means for authors to choose licensesthat grant broader freedoms than publication under normal copyright.They have since seen strong adoption in science, education,photography, music, and many other areas. Major search engines, photosharing sites like Flickr, universities, archives and libraries haveall begun supporting the Creative Commons licensing model, and the ideaof a culture which grants broad freedoms to remix and re-useinformation has become mainstream.

Lawrence Lessig, the founder of Creative Commons, offered thefollowing comment on the announcement of the licensing decision:"Richard Stallman's commitment to the cause of free culture has been aninspiration to us all. Assuring the interoperability of free culture isa critical step towards making this freedom work. The Wikipediacommunity is to be congratulated for its decision, and the FreeSoftware Foundation thanked for its help. I am enormously happy aboutthis decision."

Because Wikipedia's license was chosen by project founder JimmyWales when Creative Commons hadn't yet been created, Wikipedia's earlycommitment to free sharing and free re-use has actually worked againstlegal interoperability. Moreover, because the GNU FDL was designed forsoftware documentation, some of its requirements (such as therequirement to include a copy of the license text with each copy) haveencumbered re-use of Wikipedia content. The licensing update waspossible because the Free Software Foundation agreed to modify the GNUFree Documentation License in November last year.

As the decision to re-license was approved by both the Wikimediavolunteer community and the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees, theorganization is now taking steps to update all its licensing termsthrough June. With the dual-license system in place, content can be befurther re-used under either the GFDL or the CC-BY-SA license, but theGFDL will be dropped from content objects where this is necessary tosupport remixing it with existing CC-BY-SA content.

Questions and answers regarding the license change.

For more information about the community vote on the licensing change:

About the Wikimedia Foundation

The Wikimedia Foundation is the non-profit organization whichoperates Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia. According to comScore MediaMetrix, Wikipedia and the other projects operated by the WikimediaFoundation receive more than 300 million unique visitors per month,making them the 4th most popular web property world-wide. Available inmore than 265 languages, Wikipedia contains more than 12 millionarticles contributed by a global volunteer community of more than100,000 people. Based in San Francisco, California, the WikimediaFoundation is an audited, 501(c)(3) charity that is funded primarilythrough donations and grants.

Questions and answers regarding the license change.

Press contact:

Jay Walsh, Head of Communications

Wikimedia Foundation

+1 415-839-6885, ext 609

jwalsh

wikimedia.org