19 Mar

Commons:Village pump/Copyright

‎GFDL only: explanation
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Revision as of 14:54, 19 March 2013
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:::Works licensed only under the GFDL are accepted, but such licensing is discouraged. What's unclear? ''—[[User:LX|LX]] ([[User_talk:LX|talk]], [[Special:Contributions/LX|contribs]])'' 13:40, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

:::Works licensed only under the GFDL are accepted, but such licensing is discouraged. What's unclear? ''—[[User:LX|LX]] ([[User_talk:LX|talk]], [[Special:Contributions/LX|contribs]])'' 13:40, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

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:::The distinction is between media uploads and text edits:

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:::* Uploads to Wikimedia projects have traditionally allowed the author to choose any free license they wish. License migration did not change your ability to choose: You could choose GFDL before the "license migration" and can still do so after, but it is not recommended, because it was not designed for non-text media and has some cumbersome verbiage that has to appear with every copy of a work.

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:::* Other types of contributions (that is, text "edits" like articles) have always been subject to the license terms pre-selected by the project: Before the license migration, that was GFDL; after license migration, it is GFDL+CC-BY-SA "dual licensed" or CC-BY-SA alone depending on the history of the work being edited.

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:::* Because the migration was done through (if I remember correctly) a special GFDL version that had to be taken advantage of within a one-time window of opportunity, the Wikimedia projects used the opportunity not just to dual-license the pages with mandatory GFDL licensing, but to also dual-license any uploads that a licensor had chosen to license as GFDL "or any later version" as well. That is why you see dual licensing on so many older uploads. --[[User:Closeapple|Closeapple]] ([[User talk:Closeapple|talk]]) 14:54, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

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:::The prohibition on GFDL contributions does not apply to uploads. It applies to all the other kinds of contributions, however, because pure-GFDL works can't mix with pure-CC-BY-SA works, and CC-BY-SA is the standard license now. If someone were to now copy-and-paste a "pure" GFDL work (i.e. something that wasn't migrated to dual-license) into a current Wikipedia article, the terms of the GFDL would preclude CC-BY-SA and vice-versa, causing a dual-licensed page to revert to GFDL-only, or causing a CC-BY-SA-only page to have no valid license left at all. --[[User:Closeapple|Closeapple]] ([[User talk:Closeapple|talk]]) 14:54, 19 March 2013 (UTC)

http://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Village_pump/Copyright&diff=92871275&oldid=92868170