AnOtherWiki:Copyrights

In short: text on AnOtherWiki is free to copy, share and build on — for non-commercial purposes, with credit, and provided you release your version under the same licence. Uploaded files are a separate matter and each carries its own tag.

Unless a page or file says otherwise, all text content on AnOtherWiki is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International Licence (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).

This page is a plain-language summary written for contributors and reusers. It is not the licence and it does not replace it — where the two disagree, the legal code governs.

What you may do

You are free to:

Share — copy and redistribute the material in any medium or format, and
Adapt — remix, transform, and build upon the material,

for any purpose that is not commercial, and the licensor cannot revoke these freedoms so long as you follow the terms below.

The conditions

Attribution: You must give appropriate credit, provide a link to the licence, and indicate if changes were made. See How to give credit below.

NonCommercial: You may not use the material for commercial purposes — meaning, in the licence's own words, any use "primarily intended for or directed toward commercial advantage or monetary compensation." A personal blog post, a class handout, a fan zine given away free, a community wiki: fine. Selling a compilation, running the text on an ad-supported site, or bundling it into a paid product or dataset: not fine without asking first.

ShareAlike: If you remix or build on the material, you must distribute your contribution under the same licence.

No additional restrictions: You may not apply legal terms or technological measures that legally restrict others from doing anything the licence permits.

You do not have to comply with the licence for material in the public domain, or where your use is permitted by an applicable exception or limitation such as fair use or fair dealing. Quoting a passage of an article in a review, a news story or a piece of scholarship is ordinary quotation and is not what this page is about.

How to give credit

Attribution has to be reasonable to the medium, but the safe form is:

the title of the article, linked to its page here if the medium allows links;
AnOtherWiki as the source;
a link to the licence — https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/4.0/;
a note of any changes you made; and
the authors, which for a wiki article means either a link to the article's page history or, offline, a list of the principal contributors taken from it.

For example:

"Otherkin" from AnOtherWiki (https://anotherwiki.org/wiki/Otherkin), by its contributors, used under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0. Abridged from the original.

Crediting "AnOtherWiki" alone is not enough where naming the authors is practicable. These articles were written by named people, many of whom are still around, and the point of the BY in BY-NC-SA is that they get their names on their work.

What you agree to when you contribute

When you save an edit here you are promising two things.

First, that you wrote it yourself, or took it from the public domain or from a source whose licence permits it — and that where you took it from somewhere, you said so. Do not paste in copyrighted text without permission. This is the single most common way a wiki gets itself into trouble.

Second, that you are irrevocably licensing your contribution to everyone under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0, on the terms above. You keep the copyright in what you wrote — you are granting a licence, not signing your work away — but you cannot later withdraw that licence from copies already made under it. You are also accepting that your writing will be edited by other people, and that the finished article may not look much like what you submitted.

Licence history

AnOtherWiki published under CC BY-NC-SA 3.0 Unported from its first article, on 21 March 2012, until 27 July 2026, when the site moved to the 4.0 International version of the same licence.

That move did not require every past contributor's permission, because section 4(a) of the 3.0 legal code expressly allows an adaptation to be distributed under "a later version of this License with the same License Elements." The elements here — Attribution, NonCommercial, ShareAlike — are unchanged; only the licence's drafting is newer. Version 4.0 is better written for a wiki than 3.0 was: it works internationally without needing a ported version for each country, it handles database rights explicitly, and it gives you thirty days to fix an accidental breach instead of terminating your rights the moment you slip.

If you took content from here under 3.0, that licence still covers what you took. Nothing was withdrawn.

The same clause is also the reason the NonCommercial condition cannot simply be dropped. Removing NC would change the licence elements and hand the public a permission that fifteen years of contributors never granted; it would need the agreement of every one of them. That is not a technicality anyone is looking for a way around — see below.

Why NonCommercial

Because this wiki is fifteen years of a small community writing down its own history, and the people who wrote it did not do so in order to be repackaged and sold. NC is what stands between these articles and the book compilation, the scraped training set, the ad-farm mirror. It is a deliberate choice, and it has a real cost, which is the next section.

What this is not compatible with

CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 is a non-free licence, and it does not mix with the free licences used elsewhere:

You cannot copy text from Wikipedia into AnOtherWiki — Wikipedia is CC BY-SA, and its ShareAlike condition forbids adding the NC restriction.
You cannot copy text from AnOtherWiki into Wikipedia — for the same reason in reverse.

The {{W}} links scattered through these articles are ordinary links to Wikipedia, not imported text, and links are always fine. If you want to write about something Wikipedia also covers, read it, then write it yourself in your own words.

Files, images and gadgets

This page covers text. Uploaded files are licensed individually by whoever uploaded them, and each file description page carries its own tag — some are Creative Commons under various versions, some are public domain, some are used under a claim of fair use. Check the file's own page before reusing it; do not assume it follows the site licence.

Interface gadgets and scripts in the MediaWiki: namespace are mostly third-party software carrying their own upstream licences, stated in the files themselves.

Asking for other terms

The licence is a floor, not a ceiling. If you want to do something with this material that CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 does not allow — a commercial reprint, an anthology, a translation you intend to sell — ask. Permission beyond the licence can be granted, and the answer is more often yes than people expect, but it has to be asked for. Contact Jarandhel.

If you believe something on this wiki infringes your copyright, say so on the talk page of the article, or contact Jarandhel directly, and it will be looked at.