Detail ofWin win relationship byAlex Brollo /CC BY-SA

Starting last week with English Wikipedia (there areover 700 Wikimedia sites in over 250 languages — the image to the right is sourced fromone of them), thecopyright notice on Wikimedia sites is being changed to CC BY-SA. See theWikimedia Foundation Terms of Use.

The outreach effort to non-Wikimedia wikis to take advantage of this migration opportunity is ongoing.Help if you can. One very important milestone was reached June 19, when most wikis hosted by Wikia (there are thousands, including somebig ones)converted to CC BY-SA.

Hooray for Jimmy Wales, founder of both Wikipedia and Wikia! (Note the two organizations are unrelated.) CC is fortunate to also have Wales as a member of our board of directors. Without hisvision, this unification of free culture licensing would not have been possible.

Here’s to a huge win for Wikipedians, all of free culture, and everyone who made it possible! Already the licensing change isenabling content to flow between Wikipedia and other projects. Will youinteroperate? See apost on my personal blog for a long-winded conjecture about long-term impacts of the licensing change.

Finally, note that this is only one instance of the Wikipedia community showing great foresight and leadership. For example, clearly the Wikipedia community’ssteadfast commitment to open formats played a major role in giving open video (effectively meaningTheora) a chance for wide adoption, which it now appears on the verge of. Hooray for visionary free culture communities and many wins to come!

Addendum 2009-06-30

Erik Moeller writes on the Wikimedia Foundation blog that thelicensing update has been rolled out on all Wikimedia wikis:

Perhaps the most significant reason to choose CC-BY-SA as our primary content license was to be compatible with many of the other admirable endeavors out there to share and develop free knowledge: projects likeCitizendium (CC-BY-SA),Google Knol (a mix of CC licenses, including CC-BY and CC-BY-SA),WikiEducator (CC-BY-SA), theEncylcopedia of Earth (CC-BY-SA), theEncyclopedia of the Cosmos (CC-BY-SA), the Encyclopedia of Life (a mix of CC licenses), and many others. These communities have come up with their own rules of engagement, their own models for sharing and aggregating knowledge, but they’re committed to the free dissemination of information. Now this information can flow freely to and from Wikimedia projects, without unnecessary legal boundaries.

This is beginning to happen. A group of English Wikipedia volunteers have created aWikiProject Citizendium Porting, for example, to ensure that high quality information developed by the Citizendium community can be made available through Wikipedia as well, with proper attribution.

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