bg3wiki:Licensing

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This is an informal guide about copyright and licensing on bg3.wiki. For an exact explanation, see bg3wiki:Copyrights.

When you create a new page, add some stand-alone blocks of text to an existing page, or upload a file to bg3.wiki, and the content you submit is your own work (e.g. text of your own writing, not copied from elsewhere), you license your contribution to bg3.wiki (and the rest of the world) the moment you submit it. You are still the copyright holder of the work, and can do whatever you want with it outside of bg3.wiki, but the public receives an irrevocable license to copy and use that content under certain terms.

If you edit a page, you create a derivative work of it. This must be done in alignment with the license of the original work. If the edits you made are purely modifications to existing text (fixing typos, rewording sentences, etc.) then it's purely a derivative work. If you added some stand-alone blocks of text, then the new total contents of the page are a derivative work (it might be considered a collage of text) but your stand-alone text blocks might also be considered independent works on their own if they are significant enough and make sense in isolation.

Licenses used by bg3.wiki

Contributions to bg3.wiki were originally just licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, but the wiki moved on to a dual-licensing model that also includes CC BY-SA 4.0 on July 20, 2024.

The license change can't retroactively apply to old contributions, unless the original authors agree to it, so content on bg3.wiki is now either single-licensed under BY-NC-SA, or dual licensed under BY-NC-SA + BY-SA, depending on what content we're looking at.

The following sections try to explain this a bit more. You can also read the Wikimedia Commons multi-licensing essay for an explanation of multi-licensing and why it's beneficial.

Single-licensed old content

If a page was written before July 20, 2024, and the original authors haven't agreed to dual-licensing, then that page is only available under BY-NC-SA. If the page is edited later, the license doesn't change either, since derivative works (modified versions) of BY-NC-SA content must use the same license.

(If you add some stand-alone text blocks to the page, then those text blocks alone might be considered independent copyrighted works if they make sense in isolation, and may perhaps be dual-licensed. The larger page as a whole would still be under BY-NC-SA however.)

If the original authors who wrote a page all agree to the change, the page becomes dual-licensed, including any modified versions resulting from later edits. Only the consent of authors who had edited the page before July 20, 2024 is required for this; any editors who touched the page after that date are considered to agree automatically to the dual-licensing as soon as the previous authors agree.

Dual-licensing of new content

Any page written entirely after July 20, 2024 is dual-licensed under BY-NC-SA and BY-SA. This also applies to pages that were written before that date if the original authors agree to update to the dual-license.

Someone who wants to copy such content can pick which of the two licenses to use. (They only need to obey one of the two licenses.) If they create a modified version of the content, they can release it either under both licenses, or only one of the two licenses, as they wish. Refer again to the Wikimedia Commons multi-licensing essay for a detailed explanation of how this works.

New content mixed into old content

A page may be under the new dual-license terms, but then part of it is copied and inserted into an older page that's still only under BY-NC-SA. This is not a problem, since the new content was dual-licensed. That being said, the new version of the old page is now still only under BY-NC-SA. Essentially, you've decided to use the new dual-licensed content under the rules of BY-NC-SA (since you can pick one of the two licenses it's available under) to merge it into another BY-NC-SA text.

This is part of the reason why even entirely new content is always dual-licensed. If entirely new content was licensed exclusively under BY-SA and not dual-licensed as BY-NC-SA + BY-SA, then it wouldn't be legal to copy parts of it into a BY-NC-SA page. You cannot create combinations of exclusively BY-NC-SA content and exclusively BY-SA content.

Once again, reading the Wikimedia Commons multi-licensing essay is recommended if you want to fully grasp this concept.

Content copied from elsewhere under a specific license

If you submit text that you've copied from elsewhere, you must ensure it has a compatible license. It's best if the text you copy is itself dual-licensed under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 and CC BY-SA 4.0, in which case there won't be any issues.

If it's only available under one of the two licenses, then you will have to make sure that whatever page you paste the text into is compatible. For example, if it's a page that's still only licensed under BY-NC-SA (created before July 20, 2024, and the past contributors didn't agree to update to the newer dual-license), then you have to make sure the copied text isn't only licensed under BY-SA, since those two licenses are incompatible.

Generally, it's not recommended to add text only available under one of the two licenses, since this restricts all future versions of the page to be compatible with that license. If you absolutely must add such content, make sure to mark the page with Template:License to indicate what license the page is now under.

For example, some pages in the Template or Module namespaces are copied from Wikipedia, which offers content only under BY-SA. Those templates and modules are marked as such, and remain under BY-SA. Note that using those templates/modules from another page doesn't make that target page a "derivative work" so the licenses don't need to be compatible between the template/module itself, and the page it's used from. An exception to this would be if the template/module contains a lot of text that's copied verbatim into the use-site of the template/module.

File uploads

Files uploaded to bg3.wiki may fall under different licenses, which must be indicated (via selection from a drop-down menu) when uploading the file and will then be noted on the page of that file. If you don't select which license the file falls under, no license will be indicated on the file's page, which may lead to the file being removed. If the file is an image or video recording from the game, it will be assumed to fall under Larian Studios' Fan Content Policy.