[Commons-l] [Textbook-l] License information (was: PDF/Collection feature live on de.wikibooks)

[Brianna Laugher]

2008/10/14 Johannes Beigel <johannes.beigel at pediapress.com>:
>>> Secondly, current version of the tool does a plagiarism - beacause
>>> it does not mention
>>> image authors and does not provide any mean (like by making images
>>> clickable) to check
>>> these authors.
>>
>> Ouch, thanks for pointing that out. Tricky to do this automatically
>> since it's all wiki-text with templates, but we'll investigate a
>> solution here.
>
> We'd highly appreciate input from the community regarding this topic!
>
> The printed books from PediaPress contain a list of figures where the
> license of each image is listed, together with the URL to the image
> description page. As some kind of "hotfix" this solution could be
> implemented in the PDF export of the Collection extension, too. But
> this doesn't really solve the problem.
>
> We think it's more of a technical/software thing, so I cross-posted
> (and set Reply-To) to Wikitech-l.
>
> In our opinion, license management/handling must be a core feature of
> MediaWiki, because the software is explicitely developed for the
> collaborative distribution of free content. Licenses of the containing
> articles and images should not be represented via some agreed-upon
> convention but via structured (and machine-readable) information,
> available for each relevant object in the wiki.
>
> Some information that would be desired:
>
> - Full (official) name of the license(s).
> - Whether the full text of the license has to be included or a
> reference sufficient.
> - Reference to the full text of the license(s) (in some rigidly
> defined format like wikitext).
> - Whether attribution is required. If so: The list of required
> attributions.
>
> So, basically all the information that's required to check if it's
> possible to take some part of the MediaWiki and use it somewhere else
> and all the information that has to be included in that other place.
> This information could be made accessible via MediaWiki API, but
> ideally it's contained in the wikitext and/or XHTML, too.

Because different wikis implement licenses in different ways (ie there
are no naming conventions for license templates), I am not sure this
license information would belong in MediaWiki core. But I think that
definitely Wikimedia Commons, and perhaps other Wikimedia wikis that
accept freely licensed uploads, should work on providing a "community
API" layer. My thinking behind this is that the communities build a
lot of structure into their content via templates or categories or
whatever. It makes sense to provide an API to stop every third party
user having to reinvent the wheel.

On Wikimedia Commons a little bit of work has been done to this end:
<http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Commons_API>

In particular this contains some of the license info you mentioned.
e.g. below is the info for the GFDL.

GFDL

full_name
    GNU Free Documentation License
attach_full_license_text
    1
attribute_author
    1
keep_under_same_license
    1
keep_under_similar_license
    0
license_logo_url
    http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/2/22/Heckert_GNU_white.svg/64px-Heckert_GNU_white.svg.png
license_info_url
    http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html
license_text_url
    http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.txt

The "Commons API" also has an author field.
<http://toolserver.org/~magnus/commonsapi.php?image=Sa-warthog.jpg&meta>
I think at the moment this is being taken from the {{information}}
template. You can see in this example it includes a wiki link; it
should have already been resolved to a full URL, so there is
definitely still work to be done.

I would be interested to know if further development of the Commons
API would be "heading in the right direction" for PediaPress.

cheers,
Brianna

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