CZ:Reusing Citizendium Content

This is a proposed policy for the transfer of content from Citizendium (CZ) to Wikipedia (WP) and vice versa. It is in no way official policy.

The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) was designed for software documentation, not wikis, so its use in a wiki is problematic on many fronts. For these and other reasons, the Citizendium decided to use a similar but arguably superior license, the Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike (CC-by-sa). Thus, Citizendium articles which contain no content from Wikipedia may not be ported to Wikipedia.

However, the Creative Commons, Free Software Foundation, and Wikimedia Foundation firmly intend to make the CC-by-sa and GFDL compatible. When they become so, all CC-by-sa content at Citizendium may be incorporated into Wikipedia, with proper attribution. Currently, however, it is only those Citizendium articles which contain content from Wikipedia that are portable, given that you properly credit Citizendium is the manner described below.

"How can I tell which articles are portable to Wikipedia?"

Look at the bottom of the CZ article, immediately above the categories, from which you want content. If the text "some content on this page may previously have appeared on Wikipedia" is present, the article is under GFDL, e.g., see Cobalt. If this phrase does not appear then the article is under the CC-by-sa and may not be ported to Wikipedia, e.g., see Biology.

For a list of articles that came from outside CZ, most which came from WP, see Category:External_Articles.

"How must I attribute text I obtain from Citizendium?"

• You must attribute Citizendium and link to http://www.citizendium.org as well as the relevant Citizendium article(s) from which you obtained text. You must display this information within the article, as well as make a note within the comments section stating you uploaded material from Citizendium.

The Wikipedia template {{Cz}} is a handy tool for giving proper attribution to Citizendium.

"I'm a third party site that reuses Wikipedia content. How must I attribute articles that contain Citizendium GFDL content?"

• You must credit both Wikipedia and the Citizendium for such articles, and note that the applicable license is the GFDL. For further information see here.

"I can't wait until the CC-by-sa and GFDL are compatible. What can I do?"

Until the licenses are made compatible, content licensed under CC-by-sa may not be imported into WP unless you receive permission from all the authors. Citizens, like Wikipedians, retain copyright to their work. Therefore, if all the authors of an article (whether CC-by-sa of GFDL) give permission, you can reuse their content under the GFDL or any other terms agreed to by the authors. You might also check the userpages of individual authors. Some already multi-license their contributions.

Instructions for Citizens transferring content from Wikipedia

See CZ:How_to_convert_Wikipedia_articles_to_Citizendium_articles.

Links

• Larry Sanger's essay on the license terms and motivations.
• Wikipedia wants attribution too: WP's copyright policy

Also see

To discuss this page, use this forum thread.