Licensing update rolled out in all Wikimedia wikis – Diff
Skip to content
On June 15, the site-footer and various other messages in the English Wikipedia were changed to reflect the
licensing change
that the Wikimedia community overwhelmingly approved last month: from the
GNU Free Documentation License
as the primary content license to the
Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike License
(CC-BY-SA). Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig
tweeted
that it was the “first copyright message ever to bring tears” to his eyes, and Mike Linksvayer called it a “
free culture win
” in the Creative Commons blog.
A few other Wikimedia wikis and projects have followed in a bottom-up manner, but today we standardized the site language to ensure that all
our projects
in all languages reflect the new terms (see
this message
for some more internals about the process). Want to translate text from the Italian to the Spanish Wikipedia? Both are CC-BY-SA. Use content from Wiktionary? It’s CC-BY-SA. A textbook from the French Wikibooks? CC-BY-SA.
Perhaps the most significant reason to choose CC-BY-SA as our primary content license was to be compatible with many of the other admirable endeavors out there to share and develop free knowledge: projects like
Citizendium
(CC-BY-SA),
Google Knol
(a mix of CC licenses, including CC-BY and CC-BY-SA),
WikiEducator
(CC-BY-SA), the
Encylcopedia of Earth
(CC-BY-SA), the
Encyclopedia of the Cosmos
(CC-BY-SA), the
Encyclopedia of Life
(a mix of CC licenses), and many others. These communities have come up with their own rules of engagement, their own models for sharing and aggregating knowledge, but they’re committed to the free dissemination of information. Now this information can flow freely to and from Wikimedia projects, without unnecessary legal boundaries.
This is beginning to happen. A group of English Wikipedia volunteers have created a
WikiProject Citizendium Porting
, for example, to ensure that high quality information developed by the Citizendium community can be made available through Wikipedia as well, with proper attribution.
The world of free knowledge doesn’t end with Wikipedia, and it shouldn’t. Indeed, license compatibility is just one part of a functioning, decentralized free knowledge ecosystem. Incidentally, with the exception of Google Knol and EOL, all of the aforementioned projects use
MediaWiki
, the open source collaboration software developed and maintained by the Wikimedia Foundation – so, we are well-positioned to help further develop this ecosystem of knowledge in the future.
Erik Moeller
Deputy Director, Wikimedia Foundation
Share this:
Share on Mastodon (Opens in new window)
Mastodon
Share on Bluesky (Opens in new window)
Bluesky
Archive notice:
This is an archived post from blog.wikimedia.org, which operated under different editorial and content guidelines than Diff.
Can you help us translate this article?
In order for this article to reach as many people as possible we would like your help. Can you translate this article to get the message out?
Start translation
Related
Related
Welcome to Diff
Welcome to Diff, a community blog by – and for – the Wikimedia movement. Join Diff today to share stories from your community and comment on articles. We want to hear your voice!
Subscribe to Diff via Email
Wikimedia News
Wikimedia Foundation News
“Cinematic intensity”: The winners of Wiki Loves Earth 2025
2 March 2026
by Wikimedia Foundation
Wikimedia Technology Blog
A Tech Blog Diff
24 February 2026
by LGoto
Down the Rabbit Hole
Announcing Wikipedia’s top 25 most-read articles of 2025
2 December 2025
by Wikimedia
Report this comment
wpDiscuz
You are going to send email to
Move Comment