tinWiki's publishing license

William One Sac and all tinWiki enthusiasts,

On tinWiki's Main Page there is a topic which presents itself, and which I have noticed and thought a little bit about now and then.

Two quotes:

TinWiki.org, copyright 2006 by AboveTopSecret.com LLP. All rights reserved.

Content is available under Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike2.5.

The above quotations are both to be found towards the bottom of the Main Page. Obviously, they are contradictory statements. I feel it would be a significant improvement of tinWiki's basis if this matter could be cleared up.

I expect that the statement about the Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike.2.5 license is simply part of the defult contents of a MediaWiki installation, and that the copyright message is of course something that was added manually. I imagine there is a possibility that the manually added Copyright statement was perhaps not really thought through very much, and the reason I am thinking that is I imagine the statement "All rights reserved" effectively negates the fundamental principle of a collaborative wiki, since I assume (without really knowing what I'm talking about) that "All rights reserved" means, among other things, barring the creation of 'derivative' works, or something like that. Which, in other words, means that articles found in tinWiki may not be rewritten, ergo the whole purpose of a collaborative wiki would be lost. I expect that the Creative Commons licenses are found so commonly in wikis precisely because they allow for this type of writing which we are doing here.

So, to conclude, I feel it is a quite central issue, and one that should be cleared up in at some point, whether tinWiki content is under a normal Copyright license (as stated on the Main Page) or whether it is under a Creative Commons license, specifically Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike2.5. (as also stated on the Main Page).

Some useful links for those who perhaps know almost as little as I do about this stuff:

• A brief intro to copyright, by Brad Templeton
  
• 10 Big Myths about copyright explained (while we're at it..), also by Brad Templeton
  
• Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 2.5 Generic (which, like Copyright, is stated as a tinWiki license)

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