CZ:Reusing Citizendium Content

(CC) Photo: Jonathan Clapper
Sharing, er, content.

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). Citizendium additionally hosts a good number of articles under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL), approximately 15% of its total corpus, that began life at Wikipedia. While anyone anywhere may reuse CC-by-sa and GFDL texts, within certain conditions, the two may not be intermixed...yet. This document is meant to offer guidance to particularly Wikipedians who wish to reuse Citizendium content, although our stipulations about how to attribute Citizendium articles apply to everyone.

The Citizendium chose the CC-by-sa for its original articles because we think it has important advantages over the GFDL, although the two provide very similar user rights. Also, we knew that the Creative Commons, Free Software Foundation, and Wikimedia Foundation had 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 credit Citizendium in the manner stipulated below.

How can I tell which articles are portable to Wikipedia?

Image showing how to tell if a Citizendium article is GFDL. See the red encircled text. Unless the first phrase appears on the particular article, it is not GFDL.

Answer

Look at the bottom of the Citizendium article, immediately above the categories, from which you want content. If the phrase "some content on this page may previously have appeared on Wikipedia" is present, the article is under the GFDL per the phrase that appears on all Citizendium pages, "Articles that originated in part from Wikipedia are available under GNU Free Documentation License 1.2.", e.g., see Cobalt. If the first phrase mentioned 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. Almost everything there can right now be ported back into Wikipedia.

To collaborate with other Wikipedians interested in porting Citizendium articles into Wikipedia, see WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/Citizendium list of missing articles.

How must I attribute text I obtain from Citizendium?

Answer

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 mentioning that you have uploaded material from Citizendium on the day you do. Also, to avoid confusion, and until the CC-by-sa and GFDL become compatible, you must include language noting that not all text at Citizendium is under the GFDL.

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.

In so far as it continues to meet the above requirements (it does upon this edit but may not at a later date and time), the Wikipedia template {{Cz}} is an ideal tool for giving attribution to Citizendium.

We require this sort of attribution because we all contribute with our real names and have experts on board with real-life reputations to maintain.

The above also applies to derivative works of Citizendium text, such as translations.

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

Answer

Third party sites that reuse Citizendium GFDL articles with Wikipedia-sourced content, and/or vice-versa, must credit both parties. For information on attributing Citizendium, see the preceding section. For information on attributing Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Copyrights.

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

Answer

Until the licenses are made compatible, content licensed under CC-by-sa may not be imported into Wikipedia, unless you receive permission from the individual authors. Like Wikipedians, Citizens retain copyright to their work. Therefore, if the authors of a CC-by-sa article give permission for it, you can reuse their work under the GFDL (or any other terms to which they agree, for that matter). You might also check the userpages of individual authors, since some have multi-licensed their contributions. If you receive permission from Citizendium authors to release their work under the GFDL, you should attribute their content in the manner agreed to by the authors, or in its absence follow the guidelines as for media in the below section.

What about media at Citizendium?

Answer

Although Citizendium prefers media under terms compatible with Wikipedia's definition of "free", we choose media under "less free" terms when media is otherwise unavailable or of inadequate quality. See Category:All media for an overview, but Category:High-free media is where you will find media compatible with Wikimedia policies. Everything there should be straightway importable into Wikimedia projects.

When importing articles, you will of course need to check the licensing of each instance of media therein, to see if you can import it into Wikipedia along with Citizendium text that is under the GFDL. Basically, if the template has a green background, the media should be good to go. For all other media, you will need to either try to find replacements or undertake your own permissions efforts and other evaluations.

For Wikimedia-compatible media authored by Citizendium contributors, attribute it according to their stipulates and their chosen license. If there are no specific stipulations 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, and copy over its creation date and licensing data.

What about Citizens wishing to transfer content from Wikipedia?

Answer

See How to convert Wikipedia articles to Citizendium articles.

Links

• Larry Sanger's essay about why Citizendium chose the CC-by-sa for its original content.