Terms of use of the Zotero wiki

[Rintze Zelle]

I wanted to confirm under which license the Zotero wiki content is made available.

The oldest retrievable copy of http://www.zotero.org/support/third_party_documentation (which I copied from another location in the wiki, so I don't know who wrote the original content), says "You can also always feel free to copy and repurpose any content (text, images, videos, etc.) from the Zotero website to help support and promote Zotero." (the current version says pretty much the same thing)

However, when I edit a wiki page, I get confronted with "Note: By editing this page you agree to license your content under the following license: CC Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 Unported". Is this indeed the license used for the wiki? If so, does it make sense to use a noncommercial license variant?

Rintze

[adamsmith]

I agree with Rintze - I'd move this to CC-BY-SA. Since that's wikipedia's license, too, I'd think that most contributors assume that's the license under which they contribute & I think having a less restrictive license is desirable.

[Rintze Zelle]

Bump.

Rintze

[Billy Meinke]

+1 Would be great to have this cleared.

Difficult to know what we can do with the documentation without a license applied in an obvious way.

[Dan Stillman]

So as I noted on Twitter [1], we never intended for the wiki content to be Noncommercial-licensed, and the NC license that shows on the wiki edit page is just the unchanged DokuWiki default. The only statement we've ever made on this was the one Rintze quotes above: "Feel free to copy and repurpose any content (text, images, videos, etc.) from the Zotero website to help support and promote Zotero." We should have addressed the default license, though, so I apologize for the ambiguity. (Rintze created a licensing page [2] that repeated the CC-BY-NC-SA claim after not receiving a response to the above message.)

People can safely assume that anything written by the core team is CC-BY-SA, and I imagine the primary contributors would all say the same. Obviously things get a little complicated for content with mixed edits by occasional contributors or that were copied from other pages without clear history. While I suspect few past contributors would be opposed to a non-NC license, we can't really change it unilaterally if that's what was showing when they made edits, so I'd ask that past contributors add their wiki usernames to https://www.zotero.org/support/wiki_contributor_license_agreement if they agree to license any previously contributed wiki content as CC-BY-SA. If you don't remember your wiki account info, you can also just email me and I'll add your username to the list.

Going forward, we'll change the default license to CC-BY-SA and clarify that people wishing to use older content for commercial purposes should check the revision history against that contributor list.

Thanks, and sorry for the trouble.

- Dan


[1] https://twitter.com/billymeinke/status/591060189148618753
[2] https://www.zotero.org/support/licensing

[Rintze Zelle]

Thanks, Dan.

On Sunday, April 26, 2015 at 10:24:18 PM UTC-4, Dan Stillman wrote