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.

Preamble

The GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) was designed for books, not wikis, so its use in a wiki is rather clunky. The Citizendium therefore decided to use a similar but simpler license, the Creative Commons By Attribution Share Alike (cc-by-sa). The Creative Commons, Wikipedia and Free Software Foundations are working on making these licenses mutually compatible, so eventually content should be able to be moved between CZ and WP freely (with attribution). However, the GFDL and cc-by-sa are currently incompatible, so CZ articles which contain no content from WP may not be ported to WP. Articles which do contain content from WP are portable, but you must credit Citizendium (see below for details).

Instructions for Wikipedians transfering content from Citizendium

Look at the bottom of the CZ article you want to get content from, immediately above the categories. If the text "some content on this page may previously have appeared on Wikipedia" is present , the article is under GFDL (example: Cobalt), otherwise it is under cc-by-sa (example: Biology). For a list of articles that came from outside CZ, most which came from WP, see Category:External_Articles.

Content licensed under the GFDL may be imported into WP, however, you must credit either Citizendium or the principal authors at the bottom of the article. Credit in the edit summary and/or talk page is not sufficient. See Wikipedia's copyright page or the bottom of Cobalt for examples of how to credit material that's borrowed from another Wiki.

Until the licenses are made compatible, content licensed under cc-by-sa may not be imported into WP unless you ask permission of 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 CZ content without attribution or under another license.

Instructions for Citizens transfering 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

Talk

Use this forum thread to discuss this proposal.