The Wikimedia Foundation has decided to change the licensing under which Wikipedia and all other Wikimedia Foundation projects operate from the Gnu Free Documentation License (GFDL) to a flavor of the Creative Commons license. In particular, they are transitioning to the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike (CC-BY-SA) version 3.0.
Like all licensing issues, it's all very arcane and full of pros and cons and fodder for license nits to be real pains in the butt. See this page for more.
The upshot is that sites which use the Mediawiki software, such as the dKosopedia, must also transition to the CC-BY-SA 3.0 license if they want to be able to freely use Wikipedia content, and that transition must be completed by August 1, 2009.
The process is actually pretty easy:
- Announce the change
- Wait a little bit
- Edit some files and a little bit of text
You can consider this here diary to be item (1) above. Item (2), the waiting, is the hardest part. I plan on doing item (3) early next week, then do a little dance and drink a little water.
(If you license nits want to argue the pros and cons of this, and whether dKosopedia should slavishly do what the Mediawiki Foundation wants, go right ahead. It won't change anything, but go right ahead. Oh, and 10 points to whoever names all the song references in this post.)