Archive:Projects/Wikinews finally decided on a licensing scheme!

Wikinews finally decided of a licensing scheme !

September 2005

The Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License was the most supported license in the recent poll at Licensure Poll.

Many of the options had very few voters. Of the options with more than 12 voters, the GFDL had only 21% support, and the Wikinews License 0.2 had 60% support (or 64% from Wikinewsies). Fewer people voted on the Wikinews License option than on the Creative Commons one, meaning 31 people in total supported CC-BY, compared to just 17 supporting WNL 2.0.

With over 87% support from Wikinewsies in the poll, and 82% support overall, CC-BY has now been agreed upon by the Wikimedia Foundation to be the new license for all existing and future versions of Wikinews. Any edits made previously remain public domain - it is only new edits that will need to be under this Creative Commons License.

The license can be read at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/ (that page links to other language versions of the license, and the full legal code).

Brion has changed the site settings, so the meta data of the wikis should state they are now CC-BY. However, manually created pages such as http://en.wikinews.org/wiki/Wikinews:Copyright will need to be updated. MediaWiki namespace pages may need changing if they had been edited previously. Pages that might need changing include:

• MediaWiki:Copyright,
• MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning,
• MediaWiki:Copyrightwarning2,
• MediaWiki:Copyrightpage,
• Project:Copyrights.