Specifically, the Wikimedia Foundation proposal is to amend site-wide licensing terms and terms of use for all projects as follows:
As is consistent with established policy and practice, and as is consistent with the CC-BY-SA license model, authors and editors will also be required to consent to being credited by re-users; at minimum, this will be done through a hyperlink or URL to the article they are contributing to.
Please seeLicensing update/Questions and Answers for a more complete overview.The core motivations for the change are as follows:
The license update was undertaken to achieve greater interoperability and greater re-use of free knowledge world-wide in service to ourvision: a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge.
A vote was administered to the Wikimedia community in order to decide whether to implement the change. All users (excludingbots) who had made at least25 edits to any Wikimedia project prior toMarch 15, 2009 were welcome to participate in this vote.
The vote had three options:
It was decided that a simple majority in favour would be the criterion for referral to the Board of Trustees for approval. A detailed summary of the results as they were is givenhere.
The vote began on April 12, 2009 and ended on May 3, 2009. A draft timeline can be found atLicensing update/Timeline.
These terms of use will be implemented across all sites that presently use the GFDL:
All text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. Text may also be available under the GNU Free Documentation License. See ((link to copyright policy)) for further details. See the page history for a list of authors. Media files are available under different licenses; click the file for more information.
By submitting an edit, you agree to release your contribution under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License and the GNU Free Documentation License. Re-users will be required to credit you, at minimum, through a hyperlink or URL to the article you are contributing to, and you hereby agree that such credit is sufficient in any medium. See ((link to copyright policy)) for details. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly and redistributed at will, then do not submit it here. You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource. PLEASE DO NOT SUBMIT COPYRIGHTED WORK WITHOUT PERMISSION.
- Attribution of text: To re-distribute an article page in any form, provide credit to the authors either by including a) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to the article or articles you are re-using, b) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to an alternative, stable online copy which is freely accessible, which conforms with the license, and which provides credit to the authors in a manner equivalent to the credit given on this website, or c) a list of all authors. (Any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions.)
- Attribution of rich media: Rich media (images, sound, video, etc.) that were created through substantive collaborations between at least five people can be credited in the same fashion as text; other rich media files must be attributed in any reasonable manner specified by the contributor(s).
- Attribution of externally contributed content: The above attribution requirements apply to content developed and uploaded by the Wikimedia community. Text and rich media contributions that come from external sources may attach additional attribution requirements to the work, which we will strive to indicate clearly to you.
- Copyleft/Share and Share Alike: If you make modifications or additions to the page or work you re-use, you must license them under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 or later.
- Indicate changes: If you make modifications or additions, you must indicate in a reasonable fashion that the original work has been modified. If you are re-using the page in a wiki, for example, indicating this in the page history is sufficient.
- For further information, please refer to thelegal code of the CC-BY-SA License.
You may import any text from other sources that is available under the CC-BY-SA license, even if it is not available under the GNU Free Documentation License. You are under no obligation whatsoever to obtain such content also under the GFDL. However, you may not import text that is only available under the GFDL. If you import text under the CC-BY-SA license, you must abide by the terms of the license; specifically, you must, in a reasonable fashion, credit the author(s). Where such credit is commonly given through page histories (such as wiki-to-wiki copying), it is sufficient to give attribution in the edit summary, which is recorded in the page history, when importing the content.
If you want to re-use pages under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, you must verify, for every page you re-use, that it does not include information that is exclusively licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License. This should be noted in the page history, the footer, or the discussion page. If such information is included, you cannot re-use the page under the GFDL. Revisions created prior to ((date of license update)) can be reasonably expected to not include any CC-BY-SA-only text.
The wording of these terms may be reasonably modified in the future by the Wikimedia Foundation for purposes of clarity and elaboration.
Finally, we will encourage the community to identify media files that are presently licensed under GFDL (but not those which are licensed under "GFDL 1.2 only") as being additionally available under CC-BY-SA.