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57

answers:

4

I'm looking to incolude code from Wikipedia articles in production software, and also quote it in a publication. Will this affect the licensing of either the code or the publication?

My suspicion is that Creative Commons Attribution/Share-Alike License may apply (confusingly) to the code, but not to the publication as here the code is just quoted/referenced.

A: 

I would suggest there free to use, as long as you reference them. E.g if your taking HTML then comment the code and add a link to the site "Menu Navigation code taken from Wikipedia" then link to the article/code.

Connnnoorr
A: 

I'm not sure that is even necessary. I would hazard a guess that it's quite legal to reuse any code featured on Wikipedia. You might actually be better off trying to contact Wikipedia themselves for an answer!

Liggi
+5  A: 

Seeing as how Wikipedia is a reference work; a lot of the code snippets you see are completely devoid of error checking and usually only serve to demonstrate a concept; so including them verbatim in a production project could often be a bad idea.

As for legality; the license of the source generally applies, but because of what is commonly their subject matter (basic principles that can be achieved in only one way), many of them are explicitly PDd; or else use of them is almost completely unprosecutable.

Code snippets that represent original research, of course, would be the same license as Wikipedia proper.

Williham Totland
The default license for Wikipedia contents switched from GFDL to CC-by-sa 3.0 back in June 2009. Old content may still be under GFDL, however, but the details about this is on their Terms of Use page: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use
Michael Madsen
Huh, did not know that. Answer updated.
Williham Totland
So, wouldn't qualify as derivitive work and therefore also fall under CCA/SA?
Alison
Strictly speaking, yes. But as mentioned; the nature of the snippets and the specific license of the content comes into play.
Williham Totland