CZ:Reusing Citizendium Content

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Also see CZ:License.

This document offers guidance to those who wish to reuse Citizendium content. See CZ:License for "the official policy."

Most Citizendium articles, including all its original articles, are under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike-3.0 Unported license (CC-by-sa). Citizendium also hosts some articles under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). The Citizendium chose the CC-by-sa because we think it has important advantages over the GFDL. 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.

You must credit Citizendium in the manner stipulated below.

Which articles are portable to Wikipedia?

Citizendium has differing content policies than Wikipedia, but all Citizendium articles may be copied or merged to Wikipedia, if they fit Wikipedia's policies.

How to give Citizendium credit

If you use any Citizendium content elsewhere, you must attribute 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 "Félix d'Hérelle" (retrieved on 3 January 2007), which has been licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License.

The template {{Cz-gfdl}} is an ideal tool for giving attribution to the Citizendium (it's been ported to Wikipedia, see here).

For materials under the CC-by-sa, the template {{Cz-cc-by-sa}} is another ideal tool, which displays similar to the above.

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

Reusing articles with content from both Citizendium and Wikipedia

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

Reusing Citizendium images and other media

Although the Citizendium prefers media under terms compatible with Wikipedia's definition of "free," we accept all redistributable works (and still "less free", if needed) 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 straightaway 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.

See also About Media Hosted at Citizendium.

Links

• CZ:License
• Larry Sanger's essay about why Citizendium chose the CC-by-sa for its original content.
• Local copy: Creative_Commons_CC-by-sa_3.0
• Local copy: GNU Free Documentation License
• GNU Free Documentation License (an article about the license)