Re: migrating Wikipedia to Creative Commons

Dan Marshall wrote:
> This is a draft of a petition I'm planning on putting on 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Copyrights   Please let me 
> know what you think.
> 
> PREAMBLE
> 
> In addition to the Wikipedia, I'm a contributor to LinuxQuestions.org's 
> wiki. The creators of the LQwiki (as we call it for short) have decided, 
> like many other wikis, to release our community's work underneath the 
> Creative Commons Attribution - Share-Alike License. However, since the 
> Wikipedia's content is released, with very few exceptions, only 
> underneath the Gnu Free Documentation License (GFDL), we have not been 
> able to reuse content from the Wikipedia. This has led to massive 
> replication of effort in several general knowledge articles (such as 
> Richard M Stallman and a list of common file extensions). As one of the 
> contributors pointed out in the talk pages of the LQwiki's RMS article, 
> it would be ironic to violate the GFDL which he had a part in while 
> creating an article about his contributions to the community. But it is 
> even more ironic to be forced to replicate effort given the existence of 
> a body of work that was intended to be shared by its creators. Because 
> of this situation, I'm petitioning the Wikipedia community to migrate 
> towards releasing its collective work underneath both the GFDL and 
> Creative Commons licenses.

[snip]

I think it's a good idea, but try to appeal more directly to the 
Wikipedia community.

Start with a  brief paragraph that tells them exactly what are the 
advantages of change and the disadvantages of the status-quo.

Because with that paragraph, their first reaction will be: "So 
wikipedia, the most popular wiki on the internet, should change license 
because some wiki smaller than our section on tropical fruits can't 
reuse our material?"

Try to target it more at wikipedians than LQwikians, that's my suggestion.

Oh, and brievety is good. You can have more details, but there should be 
a good summary somewhere easy to find it you want many signatures. 
People just don't read long things if they are not convinced from the 
start that it's worth it.

-- 
Mikhail / http://MikeCapone.blogspot.com