Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-05-25/License update results

The results of the site-wide licensing vote were announced on May 21st, by Robert Rohde on the Foundation-l mailing list and on Meta. The results were as follows:

If "no opinion" votes are not included, the Yes/No percentage becomes 87.9%/12.1% (15071 votes).

The Wikimedia-wide vote, which was advertised on all projects, was conducted between April 12 and May 3, 2009. The vote was managed by volunteers associated with the licensing update committee and conducted on servers controlled by the independent non-profit SPI. The standards for voting was making at least 25 edits to any Wikimedia project prior to March 15, 2009.

Resolution passed
Less than a day after Rohde posted the results of the tally, Michael Snow, chair of the Foundation's Board of Trustees, announced on Foundation-l that the Board had unanimously passed a resolution stating that:

Whereas the Wikimedia community, in a project-wide vote, has expressed very strong support for changing the licensing terms of Wikimedia sites, and whereas the Board of Trustees has previously adopted a license update resolution requesting that such a change be made possible, the Board hereby declares its intent to implement these changes. Accordingly, the Wikimedia Foundation exercises its option under Version 1.3 of the GNU Free Documentation License to relicense the Wikimedia sites as Massive Multiauthor Collaborations under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 license, effective June 15, 2009. The Board of Trustees hereby instructs the Executive Director to have all Wikimedia licensing terms updated and terms of use implemented consistent with the proposal at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update.

If the vote had received less than 50% support, it would have been referred back to the community for discussion rather than to the Board. The Board had previously stated that they supported the proposal.

Snow and Erik Moeller then followed up by thanking all of the people involved in the process, and Moeller stated that "This is a big day for free culture." The results were also noted with praise on the Creative Commons blog.