The iPhone Wiki:Community portal/2016

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License for contributions

This wiki has never had an official license for contributions. Now, IANAL, but IIRC, this means that you can't use anything posted here unless it qualifies as fair-use. What I propose is that we set a license and add a notice that states that any contributions after a set date are to be licensed under that license (that's kindof a mouthful). I think we should use the CC-by-SA 3.0 as Wikipedia uses it, but that's just me. Any ideas? --5urd (talk) 19:53, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Well, the edit info already says all this:

Please note that all contributions to The iPhone Wiki may be edited, altered, or
removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly,
then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public
domain or similar free resource (see The iPhone Wiki:Copyrights for details). Do not
submit copyrighted work without permission!

For me, that's enough. I don't need a 50 page license. But if you want to formalize this more, go ahead. --http (talk) 20:35, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Sounds good. It's good practice to have an official license, just in case any disputes happen someday, and to ensure that it's OK to copy text over to Wikipedia (for example). Britta (talk) 21:32, 9 November 2013 (UTC)

Sorry to revive a dead topic, but this came to my attention again after seeing the message on F.C.E. 365 Firmware Manager, and I noticed we hadn't really taken action regarding this. I take it everybody is in unanimous agreement in noting that the wiki's content will be covered under the CC BY-SA 3.0 Unported license, but a newer version has since been released— should we use this instead? (Creative Commons published a human-readable list of changes.) I'm fine with either one. --Dialexio (talk) 00:12, 24 December 2015 (UTC)

We'd definitely have to do the "any contributions after a set date have the new license" method, since it's not really legitimate to re-license other people's work without their clear permission. I'd be in favor of putting that in sooner rather than later. Individual people could also put a note on their user pages saying that they license all of their past contributions under the new license. Britta (talk) 03:03, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

Yeah, that makes sense. As for when we should instate the CC BY-SA 4.0 (or 3.0?) license for future contributions, maybe we can make the change when we ring in 2016...? (I'd say this weekend, but people might be gone for the holidays.) --Dialexio (talk) 19:28, 25 December 2015 (UTC)

---

Okay, so I drafted something to put in The iPhone Wiki:About.

All contributions to The iPhone Wiki posted on or after 12:00 AM on DATE (UTC) are provided under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. This does not apply to contributions made prior to DATE (UTC), which are provided under a license selected by their contributors (with the understanding that contributions may be revised at any time). If a section is modified, the original author's license supersedes the aforementioned CC BY-SA 4.0 licensing.

But as I wrote that, a hypothetical scenario came to mind. Let's say UserOne creates a new page, UserTwo adds a section to this page, and UserThree edits a sentence in that section. Whose license would apply to the content— the page creator's? If they do not agree to distribute their contributions under the same license, would it be three cascading licenses? How should we address a hypothetical situation like this? --Dialexio (talk) 05:56, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

I'd suggest simplifying "This does not apply to contributions made prior to DATE (UTC), which are provided under a license selected by their contributors (with the understanding that contributions may be revised at any time). If a section is modified, the original author's license supersedes the aforementioned CC BY-SA 4.0 licensing." to just "This license does not apply to contributions made prior to DATE (UTC)." and adding "If you would like to explicitly license some or all of your contributions before this date as CC-BY-SA 4.0 (instead of those contributions staying the default of copyrighted by you with all rights reserved), please add a note to your userpage to indicate this."

The copyright status of works created by people mixing together their own copyrighted-by-default efforts, or mixing CC-BY-SA work with copyrighted work, is...complicated and unclear, so it's probably better to not try to explain it. There's the relevant concept of a "joint work", where "authors own the work jointly and equally" (another definition).

It'd be helpful for a brief version of this information to go in the note at the bottom of editing pages (where it says "Please note that all contributions to The iPhone Wiki may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors." and so on). Ideally the homepage would also get a note about this for a month or so, maybe a link to the about page. :) Thanks for working on this! Britta (talk) 06:58, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

Changes are looking good, thanks again to Dialexio for taking this on! Britta (talk) 07:16, 7 January 2016 (UTC)