I was thinking about the licensing issue some more. Apparently there was a relevant United States court case regarding metadata several years ago in the United States, but it's unclear to me from my brief web search whether this holding would apply to metadata from every nation. Also, I don't know if the underlying statues have changed since the time of that ruling. I think that WMF Legal should be consulted regarding the copyright status of the metadata. Also, I think that the licensing of metadata should be explicitly addressed in the Terms of Use or a similar document which is easily accessible to all contributors to Wikimedia sites.
Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
On Tue, Feb 11, 2020 at 12:17 AM Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
Hi Joseph,
Thanks for this announcement.
I am looking for license information regarding the dumps, and I'm not finding it in the pages that you linked at [1] or [2]. The license that applies to text on Wikimedia sites is often CC-BY-SA 3.0, and the WMF Terms of Use at https://foundation.wikimedia.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use do not appear to provide any exception for metadata. In the absence of a specific license, I think that the CC-BY-SA or other relevant licenses would apply to the metadata, and that the licensing information should be prominently included on relevant pages and in the dumps themselves.
What do you think?
Pine ( https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Pine )
On Mon, Feb 10, 2020 at 4:28 PM Joseph Allemandou jallemandou@wikimedia.org wrote:
Hi Analytics People,
The Wikimedia Analytics Team is pleased to announce the release of the most complete dataset we have to date to analyze content and contributors metadata: Mediawiki History [1] [2].
Data is in TSV format, released monthly around the 3rd of the month usually, and every new release contains the full history of metadata.
The dataset contains an enhanced [3] and historified [4] version of user, page and revision metadata and serves as a base to Wiksitats API on edits, users and pages [5] [6].
We hope you will have as much fun playing with the data as we have building it, and we're eager to hear from you [7], whether for issues, ideas or usage of the data.
Analytically yours,
-- Joseph Allemandou (joal) (he / him) Sr Data Engineer Wikimedia Foundation
[1] https://dumps.wikimedia.org/other/mediawiki_history/readme.html [2] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Data_Lake/Edits/Mediawiki_hist... [3] Many pre-computed fields are present in the dataset, from edit-counts by user and page to reverts and reverted information, as well as time between events. [4] As accurate as possible historical usernames and page-titles (as well as user-groups and blocks) is available in addition to current values, and are provided in a denormalized way to every event of the dataset. [5] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/AQS/Wikistats_2 [6] https://wikimedia.org/api/rest_v1/ [7] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/task/edit/?title=Mediawiki%20His... _______________________________________________ Analytics mailing list Analytics@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics