Nearly a month after its public launch, Citizendium (a new wiki-like encyclopedia that positions itself against Wikipedia) still has not figured out its licensing policy. While the project has no choice but to follow Wikipedia’s GNU FDL when it imports articles from there, its own pages are still under undefined terms. Contributors are asked to wait while (someone) figures out the licensing terms: “All new articles will be available under an open content license yet to be determined.” It does not say who will make that determination and on what legal basis they even have a right to do so. Unless CZ decides to ask every contributor for permission to relicense, authors would have a very good claim to question a licensing decision they do not agree with.

I hope that Citizendium will become free content eventually, instead of adopting odious restrictions like “no commercial use” which would make subsets of it incompatible with Wikipedia and other free knowledge resources, not to mention making an awful mess of the editing process. Meanwhile, the content created by CZ contributors is completely proprietary and not usable by anyone beyond its publication to the CZ website. The few high quality articles they have developed and which could potentially be merged back into Wikipedia are non-free. I would caution anyone who contributes there to at least explicitly license their content (for example, by putting a licensing template on their user page).