Welcome![edit source]
Hi JackHerrick,
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Welcome! And that old licensing discussion...[edit source]
Hi Jack - only just noticed you here. Sorry I haven't got back to you re license issues - I've been thinking about it in between other stuff that's been happening. One concern is that we would want any content created here to be compatible with the OLPC - based on OLPC:Licenses that seems like a problem, but I also remember talk of wikiHow and OLPC working together.
If that's solved, we might still be concerned about being restricted to "non-commercial" use. So I want to throw some ideas around, and not rule out any possibilities till we've really exhausted them.
Have you considered the possibility of shifting licenses? Sounds like a massive job, but worth thinking about. What I'm thinking is:
- Make all new contributions under a more open license (presumably CC-by-sa).
- Get as many contributors as possible - including some of your major contributors - to release all their previous work under the new license, by placing a template notice on their user page. (I plan to release all my work under a dual CC-by-sa and GFDL license, so this would be similar.)
- If someone wants to use content from the wiki, they should assume it's under the old licence unless they check it thoroughly:
- If someone wants to use content that was created before the changeover, it's their responsibility to check the edit history, see who has released their content under the new license, and if necessary remove any content they don't have permission for. (Under copyright law, I think rewording is enough to deal with that problem, but I'd like to be clearer on that.) E.g. if I check the history of wikihow:Practice Sustainable Agriculture (good page, by the way), I can see that the substantial content has come from Krystle. Hypothetically, if I already knew that she's licensed all her work under the appropriate license, it won't be too hard to check the other couple of edits to see whether there's any other content with license issues. I'd assume that changes like Changing External Links to Sources and Citations and certainly add tilde don't qualify as concerns from a license point of view, as they don't comprise substantial creativity. (Important gnome work, but probably not copyrightable.)
- Most significantly, new pages created after this changeover should be fine, except where someone has copied in slabs of text from other pages. Maybe slightly more of a problem than copyvio currently is. Come to think of it, any time text is moved from one page to another, where it's pasted it will be assumed to be under the more open license. This looks like the biggest problem. We need a lawyer's advice (see below).
- The license notice at the bottom of the page will require some work, to make it clear and concise. Perhaps new pages could include an automated notice, saying "This page was created after (date) and is therefore under the CC-by-sa license."
It may be that there's a very limited immediate effect (though I'm hopeful we can get the joint page thing happening). In the long run though, it might be possible for a (fairly sophisticated) computer program to analyze pages and spit out a clear map of what's under the new license and what isn't. For each page it would look at dates of inputs, and check for the license template notice on user pages of those who made edits prior to the changeover. But the sooner the actual license changeover happens, the more of this content there'll be, and the easier it will be to find truly open content (especially if we have to do it manually).
If you did go down this path, this is only partway to being solved. CC-by-sa and GFDL are still not (at this point) compatible. But I'm now thinking Appropedia should move to CC-by-sa, and I think if you also moved in the direction of CC-by-sa, it would be an added incentive for us to make the change. I've started a conversation about licensing on Appropedia here: GFDL and CC licenses.
Then of course there's the issue of whether the wikiHow community would want to change its license. I hope the argument can be made successfully - there's plenty of good reasons, including collaboration with OLPC and Appropedia and no doubt other sites as well.
Re a lawyer's advice - perhaps a good first step is to approach Creative Commons and see what they suggest.
I'm starting to move some conversations to the Appropedia Forums, in the interest of openness, so that might be a good place to get stuck into these issues, if you wish. --Chriswaterguy · talk 05:09, 23 November 2007 (PST)