Wikipedia and others to change licenses...

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TTEchidna

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Now, hey, why would you care about this, right? I've said it at least a thousand times: Bulbapedia IS NOT Wikipedia. We use MediaWiki, we have the same, very basic, monobook scheme (even with the book background, still... we should work on that), we have an affiliate news site and image archive that work together with our main wiki. But we're far removed, and in no way affiliated with them.

So again, what does Wikimedia changing its licenses have to do with us?

Bulbapedia uses the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Generic, which prohibits commercial use of Bulbapedia's content and any noncommercial use of it must attribute it to Bulbapedia itself with a link. This is why we've had our fight with Wikia stealing our pages (complete with broken templates they could never figure out how to code themselves!).

Well now, the Wikimedia Foundation, which owns Wikia as well as Wikipedia, intends to switch from their current GNU Free Documentation License to the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported. Certainly, this transference of the license to something more similar to our own should send chills down the spines of anyone who's contributed to Bulbapedia, especially significantly.

We've had our fair share of clashes with Wikimedia before... with Wikia wanting to buy out Bulbapedia and us answering with a resounding no, to the recent fun times we've had with their crazy admins banning us for telling them that they've got content copied directly from us without even the slightest attribution. And this was before some of our members decided "LOLZ VANDALIZE YAY" despite me telling you not to.

Many thanks go to Trom for finding this out. For now, you can feel free to express your outrage here!
 
Wikimedia will still be using the GNU license, they will be dual-licensed under the CC BY-NC-SA as well, just to clarify. And this switch will mainly only affect Wikipedia, it's worth noting; Wikia's branch of the wonderful Wikimedia tree is commercial, and as such, cannot use the CC license anyway.

Okay, and with that out of the way, Outrage as you please. (careful, it induces confusion when it ends.)

Geo - a.k.a. Jioruji Derako
 
Yes. In future, I think we need to emphasize the NC part of our license, and to more strictly define the requirements of the A part (ie. A honking big thing at the top of the page with our logo and the link to our original, not just some comment in a page history file).
 
Oh I realize that we've still got the upper hand as far as protection of the stuff we've worked so hard on goes, but the point is... this is a little too close to what's been going on with Wikia for me to be fully comfortable. Sure, it could be just a coincidence that they're doing this around the same time, but so could the server going down when I hit "check user" that one time, or being laggy immediately after bringing up the top contributors list to do TC and TCOTM.

I may not be a Jedi... but I've got a gut feeling about this... even if they don't have malicious intent, they have tried to buy us out before.
 
No? But it's related to us, right? Bulbagarden-related stuff typically needs that...

I mean, you and Argy are above me when it comes to News, so it's up to you if it stays there...
 
The page linked to said:
"We cannot currently share text (in either direction) with projects that use the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike Licenses. The Creative Commons licenses are used by hundreds of thousands of authors world-wide (see statistics), having quickly become the most widely used legal tool to release rights on works other than software. This interoperability barrier with other non-profit organizations and online communities who share knowledge freely is therefore counter to Wikimedia's mission."
Click to expand...

Wow, they ARE trying to steal from us...
 
They are being somewhat democratic about by allowing people to vote. Hey, everyone with a Wikipedia account: just vote NO (unless you want Wikipedia taking from us).
 
Say that this does end up having Wikipedia stealing from us. What can we do about it?
 
Well, while Wikipedia could potential do it as a not-for-profit (in which case, all we could do would be to relicense our content prior to them nicking it to something non-compatible), Wikia wouldn't, as it is for-profit, and it'd violate the NC part of our license. We could throw a DMCA notice at their ISP and laugh as they got taken down.
 
Wikipedia won't steal from Bulbapedia as they feel that only a small handful of Pokémon are even notable enough to deserve their own article. Everything else is a list.
 
So, what exactly does this mean for us and Bulbapedia? Will it be easier for them to directly steal our content now that they are switching licenses? Is there anything we could do to prevent that, such as changing our own license?
 
Actually, there's no need to change. Wikipedia will probably forever be using a Commercial license, so as long as we stick to CC Non-Commercial SA, we're safe.
 
$aturn¥oshi said:
Wikipedia won't steal from Bulbapedia as they feel that only a small handful of Pokémon are even notable enough to deserve their own article. Everything else is a list.
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The issue there is Wikipedia's policy on verifiability, which sounds good in theory but just doesn't work for most fictional franchises. The lists were their "solution" and they were actually surprised when that just made things worse.

Wikipedia won't steal from us because the people still commited to the brick wall of trying to make Pokémon articles fit into their policies don't like how we do things. I'm not concerned there.
 
TTEchidna said:
Certainly, this transference of the license to something more similar to our own should send chills down the spines of anyone who's contributed to Bulbapedia, especially significantly.
Click to expand...
If you don't like people using the work with attribution, then why use the CC license? And if you don't like people using the work without attribution, I'm sure you'll find it easier to deal with Wikipedia Bureaucrats than with a bunch of gamers on a minor Wikia.
Optimatum said:
Wow, they ARE trying to steal from us...
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I... really don't get how you can think Wikimedia cares enough about the Pokémon fans to change their entire license.

Let's remember that it's a big community deciding this (even ignoring the huge number of other projects besides Wikipedia), the vast majority of which doesn't even know this place exists.
Blazevoir said:
They are being somewhat democratic about by allowing people to vote. Hey, everyone with a Wikipedia account: just vote NO (unless you want Wikipedia taking from us).
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Get a few hundred people (Wikipedia intersect Bulbagarden) to sabotage probably tens of thousands of voters and stop them from making their content more share-able just because you're afraid some bad people are going to break the license agreement anyway?
 
Not that I have any real knowledge concerning the matter, but I've got this strange suspicion that this licence transfer of theirs should be a tad more complicated than they're making it sound. At least it sounds like Wikia won't be able to do that, so yeah.
 
Please note: The thread is from 17 years ago.
Please take the age of this thread into consideration in writing your reply. Depending on what exactly you wanted to say, you may want to consider if it would be better to post a new thread instead.
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