CZ:Reusing Citizendium Content

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(CC) Photo: Jonathan Clapper
Sharing, er, content.

This document is meant to offer guidance particularly to Wikipedians who wish to reuse Citizendium content, although our stipulations about how to attribute Citizendium articles apply to everyone. Wikipedia will soon be able to reproduce articles, parts of articles, and other content, that originated on the Citizendium. Wikipedia may already use our versions of articles that began life on Wikipedia.

The majority of Citizendium articles, including all of its original articles, are under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike-3.0 Unported license (CC-by-sa). Citizendium additionally hosts a good number of articles under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) that began life at Wikipedia.

The Citizendium chose the CC-by-sa for its original articles because we think it has important advantages over the GFDL, although the two provide very similar user rights. Also, we knew that the Creative Commons, Free Software Foundation, and Wikimedia Foundation had expressed intent to make the CC-by-sa and GFDL compatible in the near future. When they become so, all CC-by-sa content at Citizendium may be incorporated into Wikipedia, with proper attribution. Currently, however, only those Citizendium articles that are explicitly licensed under the GFDL are portable to Wikipedia, and you must credit Citizendium in the manner stipulated below.

Which articles are currently portable to Wikipedia?

Image showing how to tell if a Citizendium article is GFDL. See the red encircled text. Unless the first phrase appears on the particular article, it is not GFDL.

Look at the bottom of the Citizendium article, immediately above the categories, from which you want content. If the phrase "some content on this page may previously have appeared on Wikipedia" is present, the article is available under the GFDL; for example, see cobalt. If the phrase does not appear, then the article is under the CC-by-sa and may not be ported to Wikipedia at present; for example, see Biology.

For a list of articles that came from outside Citizendium, nearly all of which came from Wikipedia, see Category:External Articles. Almost everything there can right now be ported back into Wikipedia. Most of those articles have not changed much from their Wikipedia versions, however. Some other Wikipedia-sourced articles that can be found under Category:Developed Articles and Category:Developing Articles. There is unfortunately no easy way at present to list them all at once.

To collaborate with other Wikipedians interested in porting Citizendium articles into Wikipedia, see WikiProject Missing encyclopedic articles/Citizendium list of missing articles.

How to give Citizendium credit

If you use any Citizendium content elsewhere, you must attribute the Citizendium and link to http://www.citizendium.org/ as well as the relevant Citizendium article(s) from which you obtained text; also, include the date accessed. You must display this information within the article in the same point of font as the article's main text. Also, on wikis like Wikipedia, please make a note within the edit summary mentioning that you have uploaded material from the Citizendium on the day you do.

Example

This article incorporates text from the Citizendium article "Biology" (retrieved on 30 Feb 2007), which has been licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

In so far as it continues to meet the above requirements (it does upon this edit but may not at a later date and time), the Wikipedia template {{Cz}} is an ideal tool for giving attribution to Citizendium.

We require this sort of attribution because we all contribute with our real names and have experts on board with real-life reputations to maintain.

The above also applies to derivative works of Citizendium text, such as translations.

I'm a third party site that reuses Wikipedia and Citizendium GFDL content. How must I attribute?

Third party sites that reuse Citizendium GFDL articles with Wikipedia-sourced content, and/or vice-versa, must credit both parties. For information on attributing Citizendium, see the preceding section. For information on attributing Wikipedia, see Wikipedia:Copyrights.

I can't wait until the CC-by-sa and GFDL are compatible. What can I do?

Until the CC-by-sa and GFDL are made explicitly compatible, Citizendium content licensed under the CC-by-sa may not be imported into Wikipedia. However, like Wikipedians, Citizens retain copyright to their work. Therefore, if the authors of a CC-by-sa article give permission for it, you can reuse their work under the GFDL (or any other terms to which they agree, for that matter). You might also check the userpages of individual authors, since some have multi-licensed their contributions. If you receive permission from Citizendium authors to release their work under the GFDL, you should attribute their content in the manner to which they agree, or in the absence of such, follow the selfsame guidelines as for media in the below section.

What about media at Citizendium?

Although Citizendium prefers media under terms compatible with Wikipedia's definition of "free", we choose media under "less free" terms when media is otherwise unavailable or of inadequate quality. See Category:All media for an overview, but Category:High-free media is where you will find media compatible with Wikimedia policies. Everything there should be straightway importable into Wikimedia projects.

When importing articles, you will of course need to check the licensing of each instance of media therein to see if you can import it into Wikipedia along with Citizendium text that is under the GFDL. Basically, if the licensing template of the Citizendium media instance has a green background, it should be good to go. For all other media, you will need to either try to find replacements or undertake your own permissions efforts or other evaluations.

For Wikimedia-compatible media authored by Citizendium contributors, attribute it according to their stipulates and their chosen license. If there are no specific stipulations about attribution, the default is to attribute the media to the author by name, source it to the Citizendium and link to the specific page where the media resides, and copy over its creation date and licensing data.

What about Citizens wishing to transfer content from Wikipedia?

See How to convert Wikipedia articles to Citizendium articles.

Links

• Larry Sanger's essay about why Citizendium chose the CC-by-sa for its original content.