We are currently attempting to refactor some specific modifications to
the standard MW code we use (1.13.2) into an extension so we can upgrade
to a more recent maintained version. One modification we have keeps a
flag in the revisions table specifying that article text was imported
from WP. This flag generates an attribution statement at the bottom of
the article that acknowledges the import.
I don't want to start a discussion about the various legal issues
surrounding text licensing. However, assuming we must acknowledge use of
licensed text, a legitimate technical issue is how to associate state
with an article in a way that records the import of licensed text. I
bring this up here because I assume we are not the only site that faces
this issue.
Some of our users want to encode the attribution information in a
template. The problem with this approach is anyone can come along and
remove it. That would mean the organization legally responsible for the
site would entrust the integrity of site content to any arbitrary author.
We may go this route, but for the sake of this discussion I assume such a
strategy is not viable. So, the remainder of this post assumes we need to
keep such licensing state in the db.
After asking around, one suggestion was to keep the licensing state in
the page_props table. This seems very reasonable and I would be
interested in comments by this community on the idea. Of course, there
has to be a way to get this state set, but it seems likely that could be
achieved using an extension triggered when an article is edited.
Since this post is already getting long, let me close by asking whether
support for associating licensing information with articles might be
useful to a large number of sites. If so, the perhaps it belongs in the
core.
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-- Dan Nessett