iNat to Wikipedia pipeline - THANK YOU and tool tutorial

While there are certainly people that have made an affirmative decision to choose a particular license, I believe the vast bulk of iNat contributors choose to go with the default. I’m all for allowing people to retain the control they choose over the content they provide, but I do think the defaults should be set to reflect the level of sharing that an average science-minded user might expect.

There was a long discussion here about trying to shift the default license to be CC-BY rather than CC-BY-NC. It seemed there was good support for this, but also a minority who felt that the possibility of commercial use would surprise some new users.

I would prefer to see a more guided process to selecting a license. For an example, new users could be asked this:

Which type of sharing do you want to allow for your photos by default?

  1. Attribution Required only (CC-BY). This would allow your photos to be used on Wikimedia Commons projects such as Wikipedia AND by researchers via the GBIF data exchange.
  2. Attribution Required with Non-Commercial restriction (CC-BY-NC). This would allow your photos to be used by researchers via the GBIF data exchange, but NOT on Wikimedia Commons projects such as Wikipedia.
  3. Attribution Required with ShareAlike restriction (CC-BY-SA). This would allow your photos to be used on Wikimedia Commons projects such as Wikipedia, but NOT by researchers via the GBIF data exchange.
  4. All Rights Reserved. You retain all rights to your photos. NO ONE can reuse the copies you upload to iNaturalist.
  5. A different license. Click here to see less common license options
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