Hello.
I am a developer at PediaPress, working for the wiki-to-print project
in collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation
(
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Wikis_Go_Printable
).
By leveraging the MediaWiki API we have reached a point where an
integration to any MediaWiki installation is possible with almost no
configuration. But there's one last problem we couldn't solve,
specificially problems with licenses, that occur in two different
places.
1. Is it possible to programatically get the full text of the license
for the articles of a MediaWiki (ideally in form of an article in the
same MediaWiki installation)?
This information is needed by our project and probably by other
projects that want to respect license issues, too. With api.php?
action=query&meta=siteinfo only the name of the license can be
retrieved. The license name contained in siteinfo has only indirect
relation to the actual license found in the MediaWiki: On
en.wikipedia.org for example, the article "GNU Free Documentation
License" is an article *about* the GFDL, which links to
"Wikipedia:Text of the GNU Free Documentation License" (which itself
has the shortcut "Wikipedia:GFDL"). On
de.wikipedia.org, the article
"Wikipedia:Text of the GNU Free Documentation License" does not
exists, but "Wikipedia:GFDL" does.
2. Is it possible to get the licenses (or at least license names) for
images?
The image descriptions (or "comments" from
action=query&prop=imageinfo&iiprop=comment) only include templates
("license boxes") whose names differ from one MediaWiki installation
to the other; needless to say, that not every included template needs
to be used for licensing information. Another problem with
iiprop=comment is, that sometimes not the full description text is
returned.
Thanks and best regards,
Johannes Beigel