Will Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia that anyone can edit, adopt the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license? The Wikimedia community is voting to determine the course of licensing of this free content.
The Wikimedia Foundation has invited the Wikimedia community to vote on the proposal to license Wikimedia material so it is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC-BY-SA), while retaining dual licensing with the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL). This is a step to collect, develop and disseminate educational material, and make it available to people everywhere, free of charge!
This migration would be a huge boost for the free culture movement, and for Wikipedia and Creative Commons until the migration happens there is an unnecessary licensing barrier between the most important free culture project (Wikipedia of course, currently under the Free Documentation License, intended for software documentation) and most other free culture projects and individual creators, which use the aforementioned CC BY-SA license.
So who can vote?
All users who have made at least 25 edits to any Wikimedia project prior to March 15, 2009, can vote. Start voting here. If it gets less than 50% votes, further Board-level and community consultation will follow. If 50% or more voters express a preference for change, it will be referred to the Board of Trustees for approval.
The vote began on April 12, 2009, and ends on May 3, 2009. Here is a nice banner for seeking voting support on your site.