BITPlan waihekepedia Wiki talk:Community Portal

I'd love to contribute to Waihekepedia, but firstly i'd like a more concrete statement about what license my content would be covered by/under. This page: Waihekepedia:General disclaimer suggests that you're using the GFDL, but it also seems pretty much the stock page that comes with a MediaWiki install. Will content in Waihekepedia be licensed under the GFDL or could the community also consider using the the CC-By-SA license instead that is used by many similar projects, notably WikiTravel? Personally I think that the CC-BY-SA is more in line with this kind of project and it would be good to think/discuss this in a bit more detail first before too much content is entered. Countrymike 11:08, 31 August 2007 (NZST)

Well Country Mike - we'll obviously have to educate ourselves about the differences between the two licenses.

GFDL

CC by SA ? all I can find out is that it must be some variation of the Creative Commons license

Creative Commons

Can you help clarify this for everyone please ?

Licensing for Waihekepedia - Discussion

Well... ok, here we go (again)I guess... :-) but it's important stuff if we're really a "community" because the community may actually be much larger than us in the short and hopefully the long term and getting the licensing right at the start helps sustain the type of information we're gathering, aggregating, creating here and can make that information freely available for as wide a use as possible. There are two licenses used for textual works that embody what is called 'copyleft', the GFDL which the wiki is currently using but perhaps just by default as the MediaWiki software that runs this wiki is essentially a product of Wikipedia (which uses the GFDL), and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, commonly referred to as CC-By-SA. Wikipedia uses the GFDL but primarily because when Wikipedia started there was no other option; the Creative Commons wasn't around yet. The GFDL is not a very good license for content of the nature of a Wikipedia, but it was all they had at the time so now they're pretty much stuck with it. A better license is perhaps the CC-By-SA, which you can see here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

For a more detailed look at perhaps why these licensing issues are important it might be worth taking a look at the Free Cultural Works Definition and seeing whether the values of Waihekepedia align. Also take a look at the Wikitravel site's explanation of their licensing: http://wikitravel.org/en/Wikitravel:How_to_re-distribute_Wikitravel_content

One of the difficulties with the GFDL is that is requires that texts that are printed out be printed out with a copy of the license -- which is about 10 pages of semi-legalese ramblings, which doesn't make much sense for small articles that you may want in an information center in Artworks. The CC-By-SA is really designed more for this type of content, whereas the GFDL is originally for larger software documentation.

As you might have guessed I've got a bit of experience in this Wiki thing -- it's pretty much one of my great passions in life and you've just managed to beat me to the punch on creating one for Waiheke, so if you'd prefer to have a chat about all this in the Lazy Lounge say, then i'd be keen on that as well and I may know a few others ... not that I know who you are because you haven't filled in your user page and you don't sign your posts ;-) Countrymike 15:01, 31 August 2007 (NZST)