The Wikimedia Foundation-wide vote on licensing began on April 12. The vote, which is securely administered for the Foundation by Software in the Public Interest, is advertised through a CentralNotice for logged-in editors; the voting page can be accessed directly here.

Any editor (excluding bots) who has made at least 25 edits to any Wikimedia project prior to March 15, 2009 is welcome to participate. The vote is regarding whether the Wikimedia Foundation should adopt Creative Commons dual-licensing for the projects.

The voting page reads:

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.

The vote has three options:

• Yes, I am in favor of this change
• No, I am opposed to this change
• I do not have an opinion on this change

The vote will run until May 3, 2009. Voters may change their minds and resubmit their votes after voting.

If more than 50% of voters are opposed to the change, it will not be implemented and further discussion will ensue; if more than 50% of voters are in favor, it will be referred to the Foundation Board of Trustees.

The proposal has been the subject of much debate within the community, following the extensive process that resulted in the GFDL 1.3 license that allows for the switch. Much of the discussion has been on Foundation-l, but the main pages about the proposal are on Meta. The Foundation has answered some questions on the FAQ page, while some of the arguments against the proposal may be found at the open oppositional arguments page.

Questions regarding the vote can be referred to the Licensing committee; the proposal itself can be discussed on the FAQ talk page.

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In this issue

13 April 2009 (all comments)

License vote

News and notes

Dispatches

WikiProject report

Discussion report

Features and admins

Technology report

Arbitration report

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