After 4 years, we need a content licence. It wasn't as important back then, but as we gather more and more editors (especially now that anonymous users can make edits too), and as people are starting to be interested in using our content, we need a content licence.
The event that made us move forward on this was actually someone wanting to quote and screenshot ProleWiki on Wikipedia but the mods there denied him because we don't have a clear content licence.
Anyway, we've been discussing this licence over the past few weeks on the Discord and are now ready to move forward with it.
- The licence would be a CC-BY-SA licence. Creative Commons with attribution and share alike.
- It would only apply to wiki pages, i.e. pages outside of a namespace, like Karl Marx
- All edits made into these pages automatically fall under that licence.
Furthermore, the licence will be retroactive and apply to all edits made prior to it being rolled out. We need this because of the sheer amount of edits, otherwise it would just be impossible to have a licence for both the editors and people who want to use our content.
We assume everyone is on board with it being retroactive anyway as all edits were already made to the ProleWiki name and you have to expect, contributing to a wiki, that people are gonna use and cite it.
On the application of the licence, I mentioned that it will apply only to wiki pages:
- Library works are not our own (see source in infobox on book), so we can't really licence them. If we do release our own (such as the translated edition of CIA Shining Path), licence is specified in the foreword.
- Essays still rightly belong to their author. If you want to licence your essays, you have to specify it somewhere on the essay.
- Modules and templates is a discussion we haven't had yet. Possibly unlicenced until we reach a conclusion? We can licence them retroactively either way. Personally I might be against it due to how much work we've put into these templates and modules, and them representing our own visual identity. Happy to hear thoughts.
Essentially, everything preceded by Namespace: in the page URL would be licenced differently than "main" pages.
Finally, I will try to write a page before the licence goes into effect and add it to the footer so that readers can see at a glance what is licenced and what is not.
The licence is not going live yet, as it's only fair to have a period of discussion. The discord, where most of our active editors are, is pretty much all on board with this, but I know some of our editors don't use the discord and I don't want to throw this at them out of nowhere.
We will keep discussions open until Monday unless someone makes an objection; you don't have to make the objection this weekend, you just have to say you have one and can write it a bit later when you have more time.
If there are no objections, then starting on Monday we will roll out a CC-BY-SA 4.0 retroactive licence.