https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=45767
--- Comment #7 from MZMcBride <[email protected]> --- Comment 4 and comment 5 seem to be under the assumption that the content was properly released under a free license. That isn't necessarily the case. The footer may simply be wrong and nobody ever got around to fixing it. :-) (In reply to comment #6) > Legal is already CCed on this. I think the idea of the bug is that *new* > private WMF wikis may want a different default from the public WMF wikis. This bug is not simply about new wikis. As I understand it, the content on private wikis has never been released under a free license, regardless of what the default Wikimedia wiki footer says. It's a default footer and may not be applicable to every wiki; this bug focuses on whether it's applicable to private wikis, which I believe it is not. As I understand it, as is the case with any mistake made in good faith, the footer simply being wrong, while unfortunate and in need of possible correction, wouldn't mean that contributions made to the wikis are necessarily released under a free license. There are other pieces involved, such as whether the contributor was acting on behalf of an organization (which is applicable for some private wikis), whether there was a competing document that contributors agreed to (for example, a non-disclosure or confidentiality agreement that explicitly removed the possibility of releasing content under a free license), or whether the contributors even owned the copyright on the content they released. For example, while I can certainly post a Robert Frost poem to the wiki and the wiki may explicitly say that such a contribution is released under a free license, that obviously doesn't mean that the content is now free. There's a lot of nuance here (more than I think some of the comments give credit for) and my personal suspicion is that the footer is wrong and simply has been wrong for a while. I suppose it's possible that the content is released under a free license, but not made publicly available, but whether _that_ is possible is also probably a tricky question. Some further clarification here would be good. -- You are receiving this mail because: You are on the CC list for the bug. _______________________________________________ Wikibugs-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikibugs-l
