Decision
The Fandom-migration research (docs/research/2026-06-07-fandom-migration-landscape.md)
established that Memory Alpha is CC-BY-NC 4.0 — non-commercial — not the CC-BY-SA
most Fandom wikis use. Since OLN is ad-supported (admesh, contributor ad sovereignty),
a commercial rehost of that corpus would violate the NC clause.
Chosen path: rebuild natively + move the community. OLN will not bulk-import or commercially reuse Memory Alpha's NC text. Instead:
- Recruit the Memory Alpha community to OLN (the migration playbook's "people move, not just bytes").
- Rebuild Star Trek canon natively as Facts authored under OLN's own license.
- Use Memory Alpha only as a human-verified reference signal — the G-044 reference-only pattern plus the G-068 independent-provenance rule: a Fact graduates to canonical only with its own non-NC provenance, never "copied from Memory Alpha."
This reframes the Memory Alpha wedge (Entry 009) from "AI-extract & import" to "community migration + native rebuild + reference-only extraction."
Reasoning
The three rejected options each fail: relicensing ~20 years of thousands of contributors is infeasible (CC is irrevocable, can't relicense others' work); a non-commercial carve-out is legally murky (hosting NC content on an otherwise-commercial platform may still count as commercial use) and forfeits monetization on the flagship corpus.
Rebuilding natively sidesteps the license entirely — and the "cost" is smaller than it looks, because the migration research showed content must be rewritten anyway to escape Google's duplicate-content suppression and win back rankings from the zombie wiki. So the rewrite is work we'd do regardless; doing it as prose→Facts authoring (the core thesis, Entry 029) is the same motion. It also fits cleanly with the source-registry license tiering (G-066/G-067): Memory Alpha is tagged CC-BY-NC = reference-only.
Open threads
- Whether to also stand up a clean CC-BY-SA launch wedge in parallel, for a faster/cleaner commercial proof while the Star Trek community rebuild matures (the "pick a CC-BY-SA wedge" option, run alongside rather than instead).
- Memory Alpha migration architecture updated to the rebuild-natively approach (G-030).
- Confirm the CC-BY-NC determination and the "non-commercial" boundary with counsel (G-044).