WikiEducator:Licensing Policy

Work in progress, expect frequent changes. Help and feedback is welcome. See discussion page.

Introduction

As a community, WikiEducator is committed to producing free content for education. The word "free" means different things to different people, so to clarify, as a community we subscribe to the Definition of Free Cultural Works. Firstly, this definition reinforces the importance of:

• the freedom to use the work and enjoy the benefits of using it
• the freedom to study the work and to apply knowledge acquired from it
• the freedom to copy and distribute the work, in whole or in part
• the freedom to change and improve the works, including distributing derivative works

Secondly, these freedoms should be available to anyone, anywhere, anytime, and not be restricted by the context in which the work is used, including commercial and non-commercial use, and use without geographic restriction.

The Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license was chosen by project organisers as the best compromise between maximising the freedom of the works to be developed and the expectations of potential participants who are not yet part of the open education movement.

Tenets

Default

By default, any content placed on WikiEducator is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license, version 3.0 or later (CC-BY-SA).

User Level

Any user may post content under a license that is equivalent or less restrictive than CC-BY-SA, as long as the license is clearly indicated, specifically:

• The Creative Commons Attribution license, version 3.0 or later
• The GNU Free Document License, version 1.2 or later. Note that while this is philosophically equivalent to CC-BY-SA, as of July 2007 it is legally incompatible. As such, please try to minimize its use, and consider dual licensing this content with CC-BY-SA.
• Similarly, any user may post content that they dedicate to the public domain.

Project Level

The organisers of any project working within WikiEducator may similarly choose a license or public domain dedication, as per the list available to users. The project's main page will prominently explain which license applies to the output of the project, and the project's content will be placed in an appropriate namespace within WikiEducator.