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- From: Jessica Coates <j2.coates AT qut.edu.au>
- To: "cc-au AT lists.ibiblio.org" <cc-au AT lists.ibiblio.org>, "cc-nz-request AT lists.ibiblio.org" <cc-nz-request AT lists.ibiblio.org>, "wikimediaau-l AT lists.wikimedia.org" <wikimediaau-l AT lists.wikimedia.org>, "asia-commons AT googlegroups.com" <asia-commons AT googlegroups.com>, "asiacommoners AT dgroups.org" <asiacommoners AT dgroups.org>, "icommons AT lists.ibiblio.org" <icommons AT lists.ibiblio.org>
- Subject: [cc-au] Wikimedia goes CC
- Date: Fri, 22 May 2009 14:04:50 +1000
I'm sure you've all heard by now, cause the internet's abuzz, but just in case - the Wikimedia community has officially voted to add a Creative Commons licence to all their wikis. The Attribution-ShareAlike (BY-SA) licence, to be exact.
This is possibly the biggest Creative Commons development since it launched in 2002, and great boon to the free culture community. As I pointed out in my previous post on the vote, what this means is that the Wikimedia wikis will now be dual licensed under both BY-SA and the GNU Free Documentation Licence (GFDL - which Wikimedia currently uses), giving people moving material to and from the wikis the ability choose which licence they want to use. This means that the 6 million+ articles available on Wikipedia and Wikimedia's other wikis (including Wiktionary, Wikinews, and Wikiquote) will be able to be more easily combined with the 160 million+ works that use Creative Commons licences.
This is the result of a lot of effort by Wikimedia, the Free Software Foundation (who manage the GFDL) and Creative Commons, which involved amending licences, public consultation, and finally a vote by the Wikimedia community about whether they wanted the change. This vote ended yesterday and came up heavily in Creative Commons' favour, with 88% of people with an opinion voting to add the BY-SA licence (10% of voters said they didn't have an opinion). The vote's decision was then approved by the Wikimedia Foundation Board of Trustees and confirmed in a press release last night, which quote CC's founder, Lawrence Lessig, as saying:
[Free Software Foundation President] Richard Stallman’s commitment to the cause of free culture has been an inspiration to us all. Assuring the interoperability of free culture is a critical step towards making this freedom work. The Wikipedia community is to be congratulated for its decision, and the Free Software Foundation thanked for its help. I am enormously happy about this decision.
Hear hear from CCau!
- [cc-au] Wikimedia goes CC, Jessica Coates, 05/22/2009
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