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Wikimedians for Sustainable Development/Petition for IPCC to open Report 6

< Wikimedians for Sustainable Development

The below signed Wikipedia editors request that the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change apply a free and open copyright license to the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report published 9 August 2021.

IPCC Report 6 is the authoritative report on climate change. The full report is 4000 pages and represents the global scientific consensus of independent and institutional authorities. In the report's FAQ question 10.1 asks how anyone can share this information with regional stakeholders. The authors wanted increased access to information and for increased public discourse using this report for reference.

Unfortunately, the priority of the authors is copyright before climate change, and this report will have copyright reuse restrictions for 95 years before it becomes public domain. Consequences of this for Wikipedia are that we cannot incorporate the text, images, and data from this report into Wikipedia due to their copyright's incompatibility with our open educational mission. We need the English text for our community to translate information into other languages, and the images to illustrate articles, and we want the data without worry of ownership claims when we use it in our automated tools.

Wikipedia's traffic reports provide supporting evidence that Wikipedia is among the most requested, published, accessed, and consulted sources of information on climate change. We are the world's only actively developed option for translation of general reference information into minority languages, and often the only option for many topics in major language. We Wikipedia editors deserve to have free and open copyright on this report. The identified evidence fails to demonstrate that the IPCC is conscious of how routine and typical copyright practice is a barrier to community stakeholder engagement in Wikipedia's global multilingual community editorial process. Wikipedia editors recognize the massive bureaucratic legal process for seeking signed copyright release from thousands of scientists, hundreds of organizations, and governments who normally would not give permission without an act of their parliament. Nevertheless, the application of copyright on this report is indefensible as the point of this report is to spread information and to be maximally accessible as a point of reference for fact-checking.

Signatures edit

  1. Blue Rasberry (talk) 16:08, 9 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  2. Femkemilene (talk) 17:42, 11 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  3. Clayoquot (talk) 20:27, 11 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  4. Mcnabber091 (talk) 04:36, 19 August 2021 (UTC)[reply]
  5. Chidgk1 (talk) 17:52, 2 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  6. Felix QW (talk) 18:10, 4 December 2022 (UTC)[reply]
  7. EMsmile (talk) 21:11, 28 April 2023 (UTC)[reply]
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