Licensing update/Vote-header

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Licensing update

The Board of Trustees of the Wikimedia Foundation invites the Wikimedia community to vote on this proposal to license Wikimedia material so it is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA), while retaining dual licensing with the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The Board has evaluated possible licensing options for Wikimedia material, and believes that this proposal is the best available path towards achieving our collective goal to collect, develop and disseminate educational material, and make it available to people everywhere, free of charge, in perpetuity.

Specifically, the Wikimedia Foundation proposal is to amend site-wide licensing terms and terms of use for all projects as follows:

1. to make all content currently distributed under the GNU Free Documentation License (with “later version” clause) additionally available under CC-BY-SA 3.0, as explicitly allowed through the latest version of the GFDL;
2. to require continued dual-licensing of new community edits in this manner, but allow content from third parties to be under CC-BY-SA only;
3. to inform re-users that content which includes imported CC-BY-SA-only information cannot be used under the GFDL.

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.

For details and specific language in the proposed new terms of service, please see Licensing Update.

For answers to common questions, please see Questions and Answers.

The Board of Trustees will make a final decision on this proposal after considering the results of this vote. At least 50% of voters must support this change in order for it to be implemented. If fewer than 50% support this change, the Board will consider alternative options and further community consultation will follow.