(29 Jun 2023) Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects have now adopted version 4.0 of the Creative Commons BY-SA license! The project first began using version 3.0 of the CC licenses in 2009 following a community process, having previously used the GNU Free Documentation License.
This decision, made as part of a Terms of Use revision that was widely discussed by the Wikimedia community, will enable more compatibility and reuse with CC-licensed resources as well as take advantage of the improvements in the 4.0 licenses.
Wikipedia is run by the nonprofit Wikimedia Foundation, and is one of the most widely-used websites in the world. Its resources are all freely licensed for reuse by the public. This change will now enable Wikipedia to incorporate content from a variety of useful sources that also use CC 4.0 licenses, including publications from the United Nations and many national governments.
Version 4.0 of the CC licenses, first published in 2013, introduced several important updates and improvements. Some of the key benefits of this upgrade include greater internationalization, more practical attribution requirements, a grace period for correcting reuse errors, improved clarity and simplicity, and better handling of rights outside copyright, such as database rights. These changes make it an ideal fit for Wikimedia’s mission of simple, globally accessible reuse in a wide variety of contexts.
The press release in full is here.
