From this week, the Folia Plant wiki is now officially under a Creative Commons license.What does this mean?
We’ve chosen to license our data as a Creative Commons Attribution Share Alike (BY-SA), which means that we are open to anyone reusing and remixing our plant wiki data as long as they attribute us and also open up their own data in the same way. From the Creative Commons site, the official definition is:
This license lets others remix, tweak, and build upon your work even for commercial reasons, as long as they credit you and license their new creations under the identical terms. This license is often compared to open source software licenses. All new works based on yours will carry the same license, so any derivatives will also allow commercial use.
We are hoping that this move encourages more sharing of gardening data in the online community in general and that it represents how strongly we feel that the wiki should remain a public and open resource to all.
What does this mean for Folia?
You’ll now notice that all plant and variety pages now display the license logo to indicate that these pages are BY-SA. In terms of benefits to Folia, this new license means that we have more flexibility when it comes to remixing other sources of data out in the interweb. Wikipedia have only just recently announced their adoption of the same license, so by invoking our “Share Alike” we now have the ability to source data directly from Wikipedia (and if you are a Wikipedia editor, then you can also start to source directly from us)!
We’ll shortly start a topic in the Wiki Group to start listing sites with the same license – if you know of any sites, feel free to contribute to this thread. If you have an interest in the Plant Wiki, please feel free to join the group!
So, what do you think?
We’d love to hear what you think about the new licensing, and if you have any questions at all about what this means for Folia – ask away!
