WeRelate:Terms of Use

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The largest organism in the world is a grove of Aspen trees named Pando. The 47,000 trees are connected by a common underground root system. By combining the people from your tree with others into a single unified tree containing the best information from all contributors, and making this a free public resource, we're creating Pando for genealogy.

Contents

Information for contributors

To grow Pando for genealogy, all users contributing to WeRelate are required to grant broad permissions to the general public to re-distribute and re-use their contributions freely, as long as the use is attributed and the same freedom to re-use and re-distribute applies to any derivative works. Therefore, for any text you hold the copyright to, by submitting it, you agree to license it under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 (Unported), hereafter CC-BY-SA. For compatibility reasons, you are also required to license it under the GNU Free Documentation License (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts), hereafter GFDL. Re-users can choose the license(s) they wish to comply with. Please note that these licenses do allow commercial uses of your contributions, as long as such uses are compliant with the terms.

The English text of the CC-BY-SA and GFDL licenses is the only legally binding restriction between authors and users of WeRelate content. What follows is our interpretation of CC-BY-SA and GFDL, as it pertains to the rights and obligations of users and contributors.

As an author, you agree to be attributed in any of the following fashions: a) through a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to the article or articles you contributed to, b) through a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to an alternative, stable online copy which is freely accessible, which conforms with the license, and which provides credit to the authors in a manner equivalent to the credit given on this website, or c) through a list of all authors. (Any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions.)

Importing text:

  • If you want to import text that you have authored yourself, you are free to do so. If you want to import text that you have found elsewhere or that you have co-authored with others, you can only do so if it is available under terms that are compatible with the CC-BY-SA license.
  • You may import any text from other sources that is available under the CC-BY-SA license, even if it is not available under the GNU Free Documentation License. You are under no obligation whatsoever to obtain such content also under the GFDL. However, you may not import text that is only available under the GFDL. In other words, you may only import text that is (a) single-licensed under terms compatible with the CC-BY-SA license or (b) dual-licensed with the GFDL and another license with terms compatible with the CC-BY-SA license.
  • If you import text under the CC-BY-SA license, you must abide by the terms of the license; specifically, you must, in a reasonable fashion, credit the author(s). Where such credit is commonly given through page histories (such as wiki-to-wiki copying), it is sufficient to give attribution in the edit summary, which is recorded in the page history, when importing the content.

Uploading images:

  • Images on WeRelate can be uploaded and made available under a variety of different licenses that support the general goal of allowing unrestricted re-use and re-distribution. The licenses are described on the image licensing help page.

Information for re-users

The text of WeRelate is copyrighted (automatically, under the Berne Convention) by WeRelate editors and contributors and is formally licensed to the public under one or several liberal licenses. Most of WeRelate's text and many of its images are co-licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License 3.0 (Unported), (CC-BY-SA) and the GNU Free Documentation License (unversioned, with no invariant sections, front-cover texts, or back-cover texts), (GFDL). Some text has been imported only under CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-SA-compatible license and cannot be reused under GFDL; such text will be identified either on the page footer, in the page history or the discussion page of the article that utilizes the text. Every image has a description page which indicates the license under which it is released or, if it is non-free, the rationale under which it is used.

The licenses WeRelate uses grant free access to our content in the same sense that free software is licensed freely. WeRelate content can be copied, modified, and redistributed if and only if the copied version is made available on the same terms to others and acknowledgment of the authors of the WeRelate page used is included (a link back to the page is generally thought to satisfy the attribution requirement; see below for more details). Copied WeRelate content will therefore remain free under appropriate license and can continue to be used by anyone subject to certain restrictions, most of which aim to ensure that freedom. This principle is known as copyleft in contrast to typical copyright licenses.

To this end,

  • Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify WeRelate's text under the terms of the CC-BY-SA and, unless otherwise noted, the GFDL.
  • A copy of the CC-BY-SA can be found here.
  • A copy of the GFDL is included in the section entitled "GNU Free Documentation License".
  • Content on WeRelate is covered by disclaimers.

Please follow the guidelines below:

Re-use of text:

  • Attribution of text: To re-distribute a page in any form, provide credit to the authors either by including a) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to the article or articles you are re-using, b) a hyperlink (where possible) or URL to an alternative, stable online copy which is freely accessible, which conforms with the license, and which provides credit to the authors in a manner equivalent to the credit given on this website, or c) a list of all authors. (Any list of authors may be filtered to exclude very small or irrelevant contributions.)
  • Attribution of rich media: Rich media (images, sound, video, etc.) that were created through substantive collaborations between at least five people can be credited in the same fashion as text; other rich media files must be attributed in any reasonable manner specified by the contributor(s).
  • Attribution of externally contributed content: The above attribution requirements apply to content developed and uploaded by the WeRelate community. Text and rich media contributions that come from external sources may attach additional attribution requirements to the work, which we will strive to indicate clearly to you.
  • Copyleft/Share and Share Alike: If you make modifications or additions to the page or work you re-use, you must license them under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike License 3.0 or later.
  • Indicate changes: If you make modifications or additions, you must indicate in a reasonable fashion that the original work has been modified. If you are re-using the page in a wiki, for example, indicating this in the page history is sufficient.
  • For further information, please refer to the legal code of the CC-BY-SA License.

Additional availability of text under the GFDL:

  • If you want to re-use pages under the terms of the GFDL, you must verify, for every page you re-use, that it does not include information that is exclusively licensed under the CC-BY-SA license. This should be noted in the page history, the footer, or the discussion page. If such information is included, you cannot re-use the page under the GFDL. Revisions created prior to 30 July 2009 can be reasonably expected to not include any CC-BY-SA-only text.

Re-use of images:

  • Where not otherwise noted, images are available under various free culture licenses. Every image has a description page which indicates the license under which it is released or, if it is non-free, the rationale under which it is used. Please view the image page for details about the license of a specific image.

If you find a copyright infringement

It is not the job of rank-and-file users to police content for possible copyright infringement, but if you suspect one, you should at the very least bring up the issue on that page's talk page. Others can then examine the situation and take action if needed. The most helpful piece of information you can provide is a URL or other reference to what you believe may be the source of the text.

Some cases will be false alarms. For example, if the contributor was in fact the author of the text that is published elsewhere under different terms, that may not affect their right to post it here. Also, sometimes you will find text elsewhere on the Web that was copied from WeRelate. In both of these cases, it is a good idea to make a note in the talk page to discourage such false alarms in the future.

If some of the content of a page really is an infringement, then the infringing content should be removed, and a note to that effect should be made on the talk page, along with the original source. If the author's permission is obtained later, the text can be restored.

If all of the content of a page is a suspected copyright infringement, please email the WeRelate Copyright infringement Review Committee and the content of the page replaced. If, after a week, the page still appears to be a copyright infringement, then it may be deleted.

In extreme cases of contributors continuing to post copyrighted material after appropriate warnings, such users may be blocked from editing to protect the project.

If you are the owner of WeRelate-hosted content being used without your permission

If you are the owner of content that is being used on WeRelate without your permission, then you may request the page be immediately removed from WeRelate by emailing the Copyright Infringement Review Committee. It may take up to a week for the page to be deleted that way. (You may also blank the page but the text will still be in the page history). Either way, we will, of course, need some evidence to support your claim of ownership.

Precedence of English terms

These site terms are not to be modified. If there is any inconsistency between these terms and any translation into other languages, the English language version takes precedence.

This page uses content from the Wikimedia Foundation's Terms of Use and Wikipedia's Copyright page. The list of authors can be seen in the respective page histories here and here. As with WeRelate, the content of the Wikimedia Foundation website and Wikipedia is available under the CC-BY-SA.