We are proud to announce that starting today, the Wikimedia logos will be freely licensed on Wikimedia Commons under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 license. After all, Wikimedia Commons’ mission is to disseminate free and public domain content to everyone. We are thrilled that the copyright status of Wikimedia logos will now be fully aligned with that goal.
As you may have noticed, many of the Wikimedia logos on Commons did not carry the CC BY-SA 3.0 license for historic reasons. Over the past year, we have done an extensive review of their copyright status and worked with many of the logo designers to get a complete history. That review is now complete, and we have begun to re-licence the Wikimedia logos on Commons so that they can be freely used, subject to the terms of the CC BY-SA 3.0 license and the Wikimedia trademark policy.
We would really appreciate your help in replacing the {{Copyright by Wikimedia}} templates for all Wikimedia logos on Commons! Each of the Wikimedia logos in every language version should instead carry the {{Wikimedia trademark}} and {{cc-by-sa-3.0}} templates. The only logos that will not be licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 are the MediaWiki and the Community logos, which were originally released under free licenses and do not need to be changed.
Yana Welinder, Legal Counsel
Many thanks to former legal interns Joseph Jung, Matthew Collins, and Lukas Mezger for their work on the review of the copyright status of the Wikimedia logos. I would also like to thank Joseph and Natalie Kim for their help in preparing this post.
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