💡 In simple words: Everything on WikiDeal is free: free to read, free to use, free to improve. This page explains the licenses that protect this freedom, where the ideas and texts come from, and who deserves a thank-you. The rights go to a foundation that is run by its users, so that WikiDeal belongs to everyone.

🎯 In 20 seconds (expert summary): Licenses first: all content is published under CC BY-SA 4.0 and all software under GNU AGPLv3. Each section of WikiDeal builds on different sources, notably the Wikimedia Foundation for the policies and the Free Software Foundation for the free-licensing philosophy. Whatever the source, the rights are invariably assigned to the Ynternet.org Foundation, itself managed by its users, which is intended to make WikiDeal a real participatory democracy. The concept, understood as the recipe of the innovations (the sources of innovation and their combination into founding principles), was contributed by Théo Bondolfi. By convention, this page is the only place on the wiki where the founder is named.

Licensing and Credits

Licenses

Everything on WikiDeal is published under a free license:

Content (articles, contracts, documentation): Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 (CC BY-SA 4.0), the same license as Wikipedia.
Software: GNU Affero General Public License v3 (AGPLv3), the strongest copyleft free-software license, the family used by MediaWiki.

This means anyone is free to use, share, study and improve WikiDeal, provided derivative works remain free under the same terms.

Sources of information

Depending on the section, the sources differ. The main ones:

Policies: adapted notably from the Wikimedia Foundation Governance Wiki (CC BY-SA 4.0), with changes. See the detailed disclaimer and the adaptation conventions.
Participatory governance culture: the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedians, whose work shaped participatory governance online, with the inspiration of Florence Devouard on Wikimedia governance.
Free-licensing philosophy: the Free Software Foundation and the free-software movement, notably Richard M. Stallman and his GNUPedia initial vision.
Software in use: MediaWiki (the free software behind Wikipedia) and other free-software tools; the WikiDeal source code is hosted on Codeberg.

Each adapted page states its own sources in the source line at the top of the page (see the detailed disclaimer).

Rights invariably transferred to the users

Whatever the source of a section, the rights on WikiDeal contributions are invariably assigned to the Ynternet.org Foundation, which is itself managed by its users. This is how WikiDeal intends to become a real participatory democracy: a platform owned by the community it serves.

A process of complete transfer of rights is underway, so that WikiDeal ultimately belongs to its users, through the Ynternet.org Foundation.

This is deliberately described as a process: the rights are not transferred in advance. The full transfer takes effect once the agreed conditions are met. The corresponding agreement is still to be finalised; it is one of the upcoming milestones of the project.

The goal of this process is simple: that everything ends up under a free license, owned by the community it serves.

Credits

The WikiDeal concept was imagined by Théo Bondolfi for the Ynternet.org Foundation. His contribution is the recipe of the innovations: identifying the sources of innovation and combining them into the founding principles of WikiDeal.

By convention, this page is the only place on the wiki where the founder is named. Everywhere else, the attribution reads Concept and links back to this page.

The credits also go to the real sources listed above: the Wikimedia Foundation and the Wikimedians for the policies and the participatory governance culture, the Free Software Foundation for the free-software philosophy, and the developers of MediaWiki, of Codeberg and of the other free tools WikiDeal relies on.