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.

Citizendium hosts text under a variety of licenses, from public domain to fully copyrighted and used by permission. As part of this, it hosts a good number of articles under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), approximately 15% of its total corpus, that began life at Wikipedia. However, the majority of Citizendium articles, including all of its original articles, are under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike-3.0 Unported license (CC-by-sa), an arguably superior license than the GFDL, although both are similar.

The Creative Commons, Free Software Foundation, and Wikimedia Foundation have expressed intent to make the CC-by-sa and GFDL compatible in the near future. 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 are explicitly licensed under the GFDL that are portable to Wikipedia, as long as 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 Citizendium, nearly all of which came from Wikipedia, see Category:External Articles.

For Citizendium articles some Wikipedians are interested in porting over to Wikipedia, see WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/Citizendium list of missing 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 and include the date accessed. You must display this information within the article in the same point of font as the article's main text, as well as make a note within the edit summary stating you uploaded material from Citizendium.

Example

This article incorporates text from the Citizendium article "Biology" (retrieved on 30 Feb 2007), which has been licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

The Wikipedia template {{Cz}} may be an adequate 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.

Third party sites that reuse Citizendium articles with Wikipedia-sourced content must follow the same rule and credit both Wikipedia and the Citizendium.

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 or 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 as some already multi-license their contributions.

What about media at Citizendium?

Although Citizendium prefers media under terms compatible with Wikipedia's media policies, we choose to use media under more restrictive terms when freer media is unavailable or of poor quality. See Category:All media for an overview, but Category:High-free media is where you will find media compatible with Wikipedia's policies.

When importing articles, you will of course need to check the licensing of each instance of media, to see if you can import it into Wikipedia along with Citizendium text that is under the GFDL.

For media authored by Citizendium contributors, attribute it according to their stipulates and their chosen license. If there are no specific stipulates about attribution, the default is to attribute the media to the author by name, source it to the Citizendium, and link to the specific page where the media resides while copying over its licensing.

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.