| Rspeer added a comment. |
I agree that Wikidata has been making a big mistake here.
Many Wikipedia editors put incredible amounts of effort into maintaining things such as its infoboxes and category structure. These are not merely a list of facts about the world -- they are curated, they attempt to be organized into an ontology, and the judgment of what is factual enough involves Wikipedia's editing process and its standards for verifiability. Does anyone here think that the editors all agreed, as they were doing so, that their contributions would be dual-licensed under CC-0 and CC-By-SA?
So Wikidata isn't sharing alike. It's not even meeting the requirement of attribution, given that most facts have 0 references! I have tried to figure out whether there's even implicit attribution of Wikidata facts (knowledge provenance is something that I'm interested in), but tracking the source of any fact mostly involves guessing.
It seems that currently Wikidata is under the "who's gonna stop me" license, like Baidu Baike. Unfortunately, this provides cover to other projects that reuse large amounts of content from Wikipedia ("look, everyone ignores the actual terms of CC licenses! Even this official Wikimedia project does it!").
It is going to take a lot of effort to make Wikidata follow Creative Commons licenses. It seems possible -- there are copyright gnomes who put lots of effort into sorting out the many licenses of Wikimedia Commons. But the result will probably be complex, like Commons is.
My unfortunate suggestion is that Wikidata should start by removing its claim to be CC-0. Even with nothing to replace it with at the moment. Users ought to be aware of this legal limbo, and shouldn't be granted a false license.
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