2009/2/5 Brianna Laugher <brianna.laugher@gmail.com>

Hi all,

As you are probably aware, enabling reuse is an important part of
Wikimedia Commons' mission. We do this for humans by clearly
indicating licenses and author information (that's the theory, anyway
:)). But we also need to do it for machines, because it is machines
that allow reuse of our material on a much larger scale, e.g. by
libraries, museums, and other archives.

Currently the data we provide for machines in quite poor. Although it
is quite easy for a human to look and see that {{GFDL}} is a license
template, for machines it is much harder because there is no
"standard" that says which templates represent licenses and which
represent other things. Figuring out who the author is, for
attribution purposes, is also often difficult (is it the uploader?
what if someone uploaded a slightly edited version?). As an example,
PediaPress would like to use this information, for their printed
wiki-books, to put the licenses of the images. At the moment there is
literally no way they could do this reliably without having a human do
it for every single image.

Anyway, it is my strong belief that for Wikimedia Commons to be more
successful and more useful, we need a way of encoding this kind of
information in a machine-readable format. There are a number of
different approaches one could take, but I think it is better if we
just ask the developers for any extension/feature which will do this
job, and let them figure out which is most appropriate.

If you agree, please sign
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Request_for_extension_to_provide_metadata_support>
and indicate your support for helping Wikimedia Commons material
reach a wider audience. ***Community support is a necessary condition
to get a feature like this enabled.*** So please speak up if you want
to support this idea, by signing the page.

<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Village_pump/Request_for_extension_to_provide_metadata_support>

thanks!

Brianna

--
They've just been waiting in a mountain for the right moment:
http://modernthings.org/

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