It appears that all Wikimedia content will become available for free under the Creative Commons License soon. This has been approved by a 75% majority of community voters, though the decision has not yet been approved by the Wikimedia Foundation’s board of trustees. The licensing update/result page says:
The Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) has proposed that the copyright licensing terms on the wikis operated by the WMF — including Wikipedia — be changed to include the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC-BY-SA) license in addition to the current GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). This will affect all text and rich media (images, sound, video, etc.) currently licensed under “GFDL 1.2 or later versions”.
Jolie O’Dell at ReadWriteWeb notes, “The change in licensing was made possible in November 2008 when the Free Software Foundation updated its most recent of the GFDL, adding language specifically to accommodate the WMF’s desire to switch to Creative Commons licensing.”
Of those who voted on the change, over 13,000 voted in favor, while only under 2,000 voted against it, and just over 2,000 voted to not have an opinion on the matter. If “no opinion” votes had not been included, the Yes/No percentage becomes 87.9%/12.1%.
The licensing update poll took place over a period of three weeks. Anybody who had a registered account on a WMF project with at least 25 edits prior to March 15th was eligible to participate (apart from those who had been blocked or flagged).
