room topic changed to Collaborative Shared Worlds: Working on free (not copyrighted) worlds for anyone to use. See meta post (no tags)

room topic changed to Collaborative Shared Worlds: Working on free (not copyrighted) worlds for anyone to use. See meta post (no tags)

room topic changed to Collaborative Shared Worlds: Working on free (not copyrighted) worlds for anyone to use (no tags)

For those interested in this meta post

Is there an appropriate way to build a free world on our site?

No, not here. Unless we could create a separate section for that. I'm pretty new to SE, I do not know if it's possible to do that. Otherwise: how do you keep the information on the setting organized ?

@Vincent Is that a quote? If so could you link to the source?

As Monica Cellio mentions in the linked meta post, Writers.SE have a weekly writing challenge which is hosted off site but coordinated in chat, and links are posted on meta. I'd like to see if there is interest here in working on a shared world which would be hosted off site but questions that come up can be posted on worldbuilding.SE

I quoted the question but the answer is mine

I do not know if you have ever heard of the Cartographer's Guild but we do have started a project of a collaborative wolrdbuilding.

It is not very active and could have some help

It is the second iteration on the Guild, the first one was plagued by hackers and most of the content lost but a lot of people are presumably still interested.

@Vincent I definitely think this should be considered as a possible project to contribute to. Is it mainly map based? I think the desire here is for a complete world (solar system/geography/biology/politics/physics/technology...)

we do have some active members on it. Maybe I could ask them what they think about joining forces with this stack exchange.

It sounds like they have slightly different aims, but we may still benefit from collaboration on certain areas. Do you have a link?

@githubphagocyte Mapping is only one part of it, the ''goal'' is to have a campaign setting like the Forgotten Realms for example.

wait a second

@githubphagocyte you could be surprised, many people told me that the could not draw maps bat are interested in other parts of the project.

Since worldbuilding.SE and the Cartographer's Guild have quite different aims, collaboration should be possible since we are not in competition. However, we would need to think carefully about licences, if we are not using the same ones.

I think we do have a nice world map but that's about it. Most details about the world are not decided yet. My concern is that, if mapping is the central part of the project, the world will be a patchwork of ideas. It's OK for the map but why should my almighty empire is required to have the shape of a rectangle ? Or why is Xi'An next to Paris ?

what is the worldbuilding SE license ?

At the bottom of each page it shows the stack exchange content licence:

user contributions licensed under cc by-sa 3.0 with attribution required

The significant difference is that SE allows commercial use, whereas the Cartographer's Guild uses CC BY-SA-NC which specifically prohibits any commercial use.

I'd like to see the same licence used for collaborative worlds here as the SE licence, which would mean that there could be no overlap with the worlds created by the Cartographer's Guild. We wouldn't be able to use their worlds since they are not permitted in commercial works, and they wouldn't be able to use our worlds since excluding commercial use is not permitted.

The actual licence we use here will depend on who is interested in contributing and what licence they are comfortable contributing under.

oh, hum. we do have a specific license on the project. Apparently it is not interfering whit the Guild license, but I'm not sure. I tried to contact the admin about the project but I never got an answer.

I wrote the license of the project with some help but I'm not a lawyer and only a few people showed interest in the debate. It is still possible to modify the license since most of the content comes from 2 or 3 members, including me.

Personally I'd like people to be able to use the resulting world for any stories/games without preventing them from publishing/selling. I think this increases the value of the world as a way of promoting worldbuilding.SE. Before we settle on what licence to use we'll have to see how many people are interested and what their interests are.