Terms and Conditions of Use

General

These "Terms and Conditions of Use" (hereafter "Ts&Cs") govern your access to and use of "wikiSift.org". Your access to and use of wikiSift.org is conditioned on your acceptance of and compliance with these Ts&Cs; i.e. by accessing or using wikiSift.org you agree to be bound by these Ts&Cs.

wikiSift.org was established in NSW, Australia, and is subject to its laws. wikiSift.org acknowledges the aboriginal Gadigal people of the Eora Nation, the traditional custodians of this land, and pays its respects to the Elders of that nation.

"wikiSift.org" primarily refers to the internet website wikiSift.org and its sub-domains and the services they offer, except that in the event of disruption to the wikiSift.org website, "wikiSift.org" may also refer to other mirror or replacement websites nominated by "John Brady", who is identified as being the creator and owner of wikiSift.org. You shall not rely on wikiSift.org being always available, and shall maintain your own backups of any data that is important to you.

wikiSift.org does not consistently monitor all content hosted on its pages, and most editorial control is in the hands of you and your fellow users. It is you who create and manage the content; wikiSift.org merely hosts this content.

(Any links on this page to other pages shall be ignored if they conflict with or limit what appears on this page. All of these Ts&Cs shall be followed to the maximum extent possible under law, and if any of them are found to be unenforceable this shall not void the remaining terms.)

These Ts&Cs may be updated from time to time. A history of what was updated when can be inspected by viewing the wiki history. In the event that a change to these Ts&Cs would disadvantage a user who had registered their account before the change, then until one month after the change, either the change shall not apply to the user, or wikiSift.org shall reasonably compensate the user.

Some parts of these Ts&Cs have been copied from WMF’s http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use under the CreativeCommons-By-SA 3.0 License. Striving for brevity, parts of WMF’s Terms of Use have been omitted from wikiSift.org because they are covered by Australian Law and commonsense, even though those omitted parts still apply to wikiSift.org.

Privacy

wikiSift.org and its administrators shall never deliberately reveal any of your private details any other parties unless with your expressly given permission. Unless with your expressly given permission, wikiSift.org will only use your details for the purposes of emailing you re wikiSift.org webpages that you have contributed to.

However, wikiSift.org is being developed and cannot yet assure you that adequate precautions have been taken to safeguard your privacy, such as assuring you that the software wikiSift.org is using has been properly configured. For this reason, please do not provide any personal details, including your email address and a password, to wikiSift.org if you need to keep them private.

Limitations

wikiSift.org is in the real world, and even if you use a pseudonym, your actions can have very serious consequences for yourself and others, including serious legal, financial, and emotional consequences. You are legally and morally responsible for all of your contributions, edits, and use of wikiSift.org content. You are responsible for all your accounts’ activities (so keep your password safe and your computer secure). Please inform us immediately if you notice any breach of security involving your account (so that we can help minimise damage). wikiSift.org reserves the right to prevent or delete your contributions and terminate your account without explanation.

wikiSift.org does not stand by any representations, warranties, or guarantees about the accuracy, balance, completeness, currency, ownership & licensing, or relevance of any information on wikiSift.org or websites or sources linked to or referred to by wikiSift.org. wikiSift.org does not offer any protection, guarantee, immunity, or indemnification re your use of wikiSift.org. You should rely on your own enquiries. wikiSift.org excludes all liability for any direct or indirect loss, claim, or damage, including any loss re use of wikiSift.org’s websites.

Copyrights

wikiSift.org owns its trademark, logo, and favicon, which may not be reproduced without written consent.

For any contribution you make to wikiSift.org, either:

you warrant that the contribution is work in the public domain, or is work that has been duly released under a license that is at least as permanent and permissive as a CreativeCommons.org CC-By-NC-SA license, and you provide sufficient details to verify this, including:
- the name(s) or username(s) of the person(s) who created/recorded the material, the date or approximate date the material was created/recorded, and either a full copy of the license terms, or a hyperlink to the license terms; OR (more simply)
- a hyperlink to a webpage which contains the above names, dates, and licence details.

you warrant that your contribution is your own original work, unencumbered by obligation to anyone else, and by contributing it to wikiSift.org you thereby irrevocably release it to the world as per the licensing arrangement for that page. The default licensing agreement that shall apply (unless otherwise specified as described below in this paragraph) is the CC-BY-SA 4.0 license with attribution satisfied by either: giving your wikiSift.org username and "wikiSift.org", or by giving a link to the relevant area on wikiSift.org. wikiSift may approve a different licensing arrangement if it is essential to the success of a project, but all such different licensing arrangements must appear in this WS List of non-standard licensing arrangements, and prominent links to the non-standard licence must appear on every page of the project.

Explanation

The following explains wikiSift.org's 'Copyrights' Ts&Cs:

wikiSift seeks contributions from diverse people that build upon each other's work. wikiSift uses CreativeCommons.org CC licenses to ensure that contributors' work can be published on any non-comercial website or in any non-comercial publication without needing explicit permission from every contributor (which might be impossibly difficult to arrange). This fits easily with other websites using CC, e.g. all of Wikipedia and much of Flickr. These CC licences also mean that if wikiSift does not satisfy its users, then anyone can copy all its content (a.k.a. 'fork' it) to another website. Unnecessary forking is bad, because when data is scattered over the internet it is hard to authoritatively grow it and keep it up-to-date. wikiSift's CC-By-SA requires any copier to link back to wikiSift.org, which should discourage unnecessary forking, and which encourages an internet in which it is possible to check the source of an assertion or summary.
To summarise what you need to do re wikiSift copyright:
- Only contribute copied material that everyone can legally re-share to everyone. E.g. if you need special permission from the creator to copy a photo, then you cannot contribute it to wikiSift (unless you can persuade the creator to irrevocably release it generally, under a licence at least as permissive as CC-By-NC-SA).
- If you can only legally copy material by also providing a link to the source & its licensing, then, duh, obey the law and provide that link (which also happens to be polite, and allows useful checking).
- If you are copying public domain material, then provide a link to somewhere that gives details of how the material is public domain.
- Understand that if you contribute work that you have created, then the effect of these Ts&Cs is that you are irrevocably sharing it with the world, as per the default licence for that page.
The default licence for wikiSift is CC-By-SA, but a different licence can be required if wikiSift's administrators agree that this would be essential for a project to succeed. E.g.:
- a wikiSift project to write a play could require that the text of the play is CC-By-NC-SA, and that every contributor to that play agrees to irrevocably assign performance rights to the play's principal author (because unless the play's producers can guarantee that no-one will stage the play at the same time, it may be impossible to actually fund production of the play).
- a wikiSift project to develop a paper for publication in a commercial journal could require that every contributed photo is licensed for Commercial use - e.g. CC-By-SA is fine, CC-By-NC-SA is not.

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