WikiQueer:Licensing update

As per the licensing update vote result and subsequent (May 2009) Wikimedia Foundation Board resolution, any content on Wikimedia Foundation projects currently available under GFDL 1.2 with the possibility of upgrading to a later version will be made available additionally under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License (CC-BY-SA).

While WikiQueer is not a Wikimedia Foundation project, it has opted to also abide by this decision and support its implementation.

Specifically with regard to text, after this update, only dual-licensed content or CC-BY-SA-compatible content can be added to the projects, any GFDL-only submissions will no longer be accepted. In other words, CC-BY-SA will be the primary Wikimedia license for text, and GFDL will be retained as a secondary license.

As per their Board's resolution, this licensing change will begin being implemented on all projects June 15, 2009. (Any content not updated by this date may still be updated on any date prior to August 1, 2009.) In practice, the full set of changes are likely to take several weeks to reach all communities and update all pages.

Content restrictions
With the transition, the WikiQueer community will now be allowed to import CC-BY-SA text from external sources into articles. If you do this, the origin of the material and its license should be explicitly noted in the edit summary. If the source text is dual- or multi-licensed, it is only necessary that at least one of the licenses is compatible with CC-BY-SA. It is not necessary that external content be dual licensed under the GFDL.

Allowing CC-BY-SA text comes at a price however. WikiQueerians may no longer import text from GFDL-only sources. Any text copied from a non-Wikimedia GFDL-only resource and added to WikiQueer should be removed as a copyright violation. This may be avoided if the external site is capable of allowing permission for use of its content under the CC-BY-SA license; however, this requires the permission of all authors since the GFDL clause allowing the re-licensing to occur has now expired. Category:Attribution templates may be useful in identifying GFDL source texts in actual use on WikiQueer.

Media files
All media licenses existing before the transition remain valid and acceptable to the Foundation. However, the community may choose to modify or restrict the licenses it encourages people to use. For example, emphasizing CC licenses in the upload form and de-emphasizing GFDL licenses.

Any GFDL media file that meets the eligibility criteria described below may have an additional CC-BY-SA-3.0 license added to it.

Media file relicensing criteria
To be eligible for relicensing, a file must meet the following conditions (set out in GFDL 1.3, section 11):


 * 1) Must be licensed under the GFDL 1.3 (including e.g. "GFDL 1.2 or any later version", but not including "GFDL 1.2 only").
 * 2) Must not be marked as having any "cover texts" or "invariant sections".
 * 3) Must have been uploaded to a Wikimedia project before August 1, 2009.
 * 4) If first published under the GFDL somewhere other than a Wikimedia project, must have been uploaded to a Wikimedia project before November 1, 2008.

Image migration process
To facilitate image migration, every GFDL tagged image will have a transitional announcement added to it courtesy of the license migration system. This will initially state that the image may be used under CC-BY-SA if it meets the above criteria, but determining that is initially left to the potential reuser.

Over time these images will be sorted based on whether they meet the criteria outlined above and a definitive CC-BY-SA-3.0 tag will be added as appropriate. This is expected to be done by both ordinary users and where possible by bots.