Wikinews:Water cooler/policy

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Policies and guidelines and the Style guide contain or link to most of the current en.Wikinews policies and guidelines, however policy is based on the accepted practices of the day on Wikinews, often these might not be written down. This section of the Water cooler focuses on discussions regarding policy issues.

You may wish to check the archives to see if a subject has been raised previously.

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Update of license

Some time ago there was a discussion on meta about how to implement the license update to CC BY-SA 4.0 on all wikis. See m:Meta:Babel/Archives/2023-06#Aftermath_of_ToU_updates.

Wikinews use the license CC BY 2.5. So it does not have the SA part and it is an older version.

I would like to ask why Wikinews does not follow WMF and most other wiki projects. Is there a good reason or is it simply because noone thought about updating the license?

Unless there is a good reason I suggest to update the license to follow WMF. --MGA73 (talk) 16:05, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

The goal was that Wikinews would be easy to share. That hasn't really happened, but that's the idea. :/ —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 16:07, 9 November 2023 (UTC)

Thank you, that makes sense because CC BY is less restrictive than CC BY-SA. However with the update of the Terms of Use users agree to license their contributions as CC BY-SA 4.0. So I think that at least all new content should be licensed under that license because I do not think that it is possible just to remove the "SA".

If the license do not make it easier to share then I do not think there are any good arguments to keep the less restrictive license for older text. Anyway if someone have allready legally shared the text they can continue to do so even if the license is changed so it should not give any problems to change license for older text too. --MGA73 (talk) 14:54, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

But, "The only exception [to using CC BY-SA 4.0 or GFDL] is if the Project edition or feature requires a different license. In that case, you agree to license any text you contribute under the particular license prescribed by the Project edition or the feature." I'm struggling to see why we would voluntarily take on that load of work...to make it harder for people to reuse our content, as we want them to. Heavy Water (talk) 17:02, 10 November 2023 (UTC)

Beause the mission of the wiki-family is to make knowledge free for everyone and make sure knowledge stays free. Wikipedia uses CC BY-SA 4.0 and that does not seems to be a problem. Wikipedia have grown and is one of the worlds most used websites.

One of the exceptions I know of is wikidata where the data is CC0. Then there is also fair use in some cases but that is not valid for wikimedians to use on own work only for work created by other. I do not know of any other exceptions and reasons.

I wonder if there are any known examples where someone said they would no re-use wikinews if the license was BY-SA instead of BY. Anyone have examples? --MGA73 (talk) 08:48, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

Very unlikely, as Wikinews is very obscure. There have been times about 15 years ago when I saw Wikinews reproduced in the wild, but it's not common today, for sure. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 20:43, 11 November 2023 (UTC)

To me that sounds like there is no longer any real problem using BY-SA. Another question not yet discussed is why use 2.5 instead of 4.0. --MGA73 (talk) 15:40, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Agreed. I don't see any reason for us to use a different license than the other WMF projects and would support a change. I don't feel strongly enough that I would oppose the status quo, tho. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 16:02, 1 December 2023 (UTC)

Editorials

Would Wikiversity consider allowing editorials? I mentioned this in one of my replies on an opinion page: Without at least some analysis, so much media (not necessarily here) amounts to propaganda laundering because it merely passes along what is said at press releases, by politicians, pundits, and so forth with the air of "objectivity". If Wikinews is an independent project there should be no problem with allowing for some critical viewpoints to counterbalance the distortions, half-truths, euphemisms and misrepresentation that come from so many official sources. AP295 (talk) 04:07, 16 November 2023 (UTC)