2008/10/14 Johannes Beigel johannes.beigel@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.s... 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
On Thu, Jan 29, 2009 at 1:48 PM, Brianna Laugher brianna.laugher@gmail.comwrote:
2008/10/14 Johannes Beigel johannes.beigel@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.s... 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&metahttp://toolserver.org/%7Emagnus/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.
Hello,
I'm speaking for the Poster Project of Fr-Wikipedia, but its needs are very similar to PediaPress.
We need to answer this question : << What is the minimum Credit line to provide when distributing the file? >>
We currently parse/provide the document, that's why such Commons API would help a lot.
But, even with this API, we still have to answer questions: - do we have to provide author, origin, uploader or commons url? - with the API, how can we get the shortest text to provide? (if possible without even checking the licence)
Example on the functionnality we would need: GetMinimumCreditLine("Sa-warthog.jpg", "printable", "en") -> ("From Sanjay ach, under GFDL", FlagProvideGFDL)
or GetMinimumCreditLine("Sa-warthog.jpg", "web", "en") -> ("From Sanjay ach, under <a href='urlgfdl'>GFDL</a>")
Cheers, Plyd
Implementing it would allow implementing bugs 3361, 9294 and 9616 (with a 'copyrighted' license). Also affect 14048.
Also note we will need some licensing system if the wikis move to CC-BY-SA to differenciate GFDL+CC-BY-SA and CC-BY-SA only content.