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BhamWiki is licensed under a compatible Creative Commons license. See Bhamwiki:Copyrights. Furthermore, I am the author of both articles and am therefore capable of placing this article's text under the GFDL. --Dystopos 00:58, 29 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I was told that the CC-BY-SA license was not compatible with the GFDL. I believe that it is compatible, except that derivative works would need to be dual-licensed (which is allowed by Wikipedia). In any case, BhamWiki's section on copyright now includes specific permission for re-publishing its CC-BY-SA content under Wikipedia's GFDL and an instruction to cite the original author. --Dystopos 22:06, 29 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
For those of you reading this who still do not understand the meaning of "compatible" I offer this description:
Here's what I mean by compatible: Lets say I come across a work that is licensed under the CC-BY-SA 2.5. That license gives me the permission to appropriate and republish that work under its own terms (give attribution to the author and include a copy or pointer to the original license). If I then use that permission to publish the work on Wikipedia under a dual-license, the contribution remains available under the CC license and also becomes available under the GFDL. Since the contribution is now licensed under the GFDL, its derivative works are also GFDL. Someone wishing to use the the CC licensed contributions without meeting the additional terms of the GFDL (for whatever mysterious reason) would either (A) research the history of the article and re-use only those contributions which are dual-licensed or (B) Follow the link back to the CC-licensed source material and use it directly. This gets complicated (see Wikipedia:Multi-licensing), but is not against the rules. --Dystopos 14:45, 30 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
If we really want to argue the semantics of this, here's my view: There's a statement on the BhamWiki copyright page as follows: "BhamWiki content may be used on Wikipedia or other GFDL-licensed publications under the terms of the Gnu Free Documentation License." (emphasis mine) I would read that to mean that they are licensing the content to Wikipedia under the GFDL. In other words, all their stuff is already dual licensed: They license it under CC for everyone else, and GFDL for Wikipedia. If that's not what they mean, and what they really mean is "All our stuff is licensed under CC, but it's okay for Wikipedia to take that stuff and then have Wikipedia relicense it to other people under the GFDL", then I think they need to clarify that statement a bit. --adavidw 20:48, 5 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
The fact of the matter is that, anything published under the CC-BY-SA license can be republished under the GFDL if the terms of the CC license are met. The only term that would be a sticking point would be the requirement that a copy of the license or a link to it be published with a derivative work. Since the person who posted it here (me) contributed it under a dual-license, the requirement has been met and derivative works use the GFDL or multi-license adopted by the downstream contributor. When I took it upon myself to elaborate on the copyright policy at BhamWiki.com, my intention was to explain, not to modify, the terms of the license. If you have a suggestion for how to make that more clear, I'm all ears. --Dystopos 23:48, 5 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I think everything you're doing here is perfectly clear, and that even if Bhamwiki content is only available by CC-BY-SA, you/we/wikipedia satisfy every term of the license, no problem. The only point of confusion on my part is whether Bhamwiki intentionally dual-licenses all of their content under CC and GFDL (with the GFDL license only extended to other GFDL users), or if I'm misreading the policy they state on their site and they only intend to license via CC-BY-SA (which of course we can use with proper attribution). I just think it's a slightly ambiguous statement at Bhamwiki:Copyrights. --adavidw 00:08, 6 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I'll work on it. Thanks for the comments. --Dystopos 01:53, 6 February 2007 (UTC) (founder of BhamWiki.com)[reply]
(founder of BhamWiki.com) Ah, I'm less confused now. Thanks. --adavidw 02:54, 6 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]
I have recently become aware that providing a link from Wikipedia to BhamWiki is in violation of Wikipedia's consensus guidelines on external linking/conflict of interest. Another editor might well decide to preserve the link. I do believe it to be useful to users of Wikipedia. The link to Flickr provides access to more information than would be practical to add to an encyclopedia article. I will restore that link as soon as the article is back in business. --Dystopos 00:58, 29 January 2007 (UTC)[reply]
