What is this text licensed under?Edit

Some of the Copyrights page is (as foreshadowed by the warning near the top) a couple of years out of date. Saying "the text in this wiki is not GFDL and therefore not compatible with Wikimedia projects or other Wikia projects" is now meaningless since Wikimedia and Wikia generally switched to CC-BY-SA. Near the top of the page is a big red WARNING saying the material below it may be out of date; well said. But above that line is a statement that readers should look to a specified Central Wikia link; the linked page says nothing specific about this wiki but does have the significant statement "The license used by a wiki is made clear in the footer and/or on the edit page. "

I see (having now looked for it) that the edit page does say "all contributions to Freeciv are considered to be released under the GNU General Public License (see Wikia:Licensing for details).", so that does cover text as well as other "documentation", but the indication of where to see details is wrong. Those of you who have access to the MediaWiki that displays that should fix it soon.

Your footer has at present only two possible references, "Terms of Use" and "CC-BY-SA", both going to Central Wikia and not to anything mentioning GPL. I guess that you need Wikia staff to help correct the footer.

This wiki needs a more easily accessible clear statement of what its text is licensed under; preferably on or linked from the home page, e.g. in the footer, as noted on Central Wikia. Some of us who have a vague idea of what GPL is thought it referred to documentation accompanying a program. This wiki is a step or two removed from that, and therefore the wiki should explain just what is covered and what people may do with it. The Wikipedia article helps very little, including, for example, these: "Copyleft applies only when a person seeks to redistribute the program", "the copyleft applies only to the software and not to its output", "It is possible to use the GPL for text documents instead of computer programs, or more generally for all kinds of media, if it is clear what constitutes the source code...".

I hope the Freeciv:Copyrights page can soon contain advice to readers about what, if anything, they have to do if they want to reproduce material elsewhere, such as in another Wikia.

Robin Patterson (Talk) 00:34, February 22, 2011 (UTC)