Publish a Wiki Page under Creative Commons License

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Why?

A clearly defined license allows correct spreading, re-using, improving and advertising the content of the wiki pages. Many people within the 52°North communites work hard at creating good documentation along with good software. If we publish the documentation under a license that allows users to take advantage of it in different environments, for example their own blogs or websites, then we also advertise the original product - our great pieces of software.

Why Creative Commons?

Creative Commons is the most widely acknowledges organisation which offers a variety of licenses for different purposes. It's simple the best! And the big advantage is not only that they licenses are widespread, but also that they come in different "layers" and very well documented, which makes them easy to understand and use even for non-lawyers. And they have been translated into many different languages.

How?

1. Choose License

The Creative Commons project offers a variety of licenses for publishing original work. We strongly recommend to use the Attribution 3.0 Unported (CC BY 3.0) license, because it allows commercial uses. Please make also sure all contributors to the page agree with that license.

2. Add CC-BY license code and image to the bottom of the wiki page

Add a horizontal line at the bottom of the page (--- in wiki editing mode, the hammer in the second row of icons above the WYSIWHG editor) and add the following HTML code afterwards:

<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons Licence" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/3.0/88x31.png" /></a><br />This work is licensed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/">Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License</a>.

The content of your editor window should be similar to this screenshot:

These two steps will render the following result at the bottom of the page.

Note that this works well with the generic copyright statement at the bottom of each page, which simply tells you to watch out that the content actually falls under some copyright which is not further defined. But now you changed that!

3. Add CC-BY logo to the top of the wiki page (optional)

This is not strictly neccessary, but it promotes the license of the page more effectively. And since the CC license logos are widely known, people interested in reusing your page's content are very likely to recognize it.

The following code must be added at the very top, for example above the first headline, using the wiki syntax editing mode.

<a href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/"><img alt="Creative Commons Licence" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by/3.0/80x15.png" style="border-width:0; margin: 1em 0;" /></a>

The content of your editor window should be similar to this screenshot:

As the result the top of your page looks like this.

You can also add float: right; to the style attribute of the image to have the image floating at the top right corner of the page as shown on this page.

Example Pages

• SensorVis
• PublishPageUnderCreativeCommons

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License.