(+cc Nemo and Wikidata-tech)

On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 5:33 AM, Gergo Tisza <gtisza@wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Fri, Sep 26, 2014 at 2:49 AM, Rob Lanphier <robla@wikimedia.org> wrote:
There's an item that's Luis Villa added to the MW Core backlog that I'd like to move to the Multimedia backlog:

I'm assuming everything that he describes fits nicely into what is planned for Structured Data.  Assuming that's true, should I just copy/paste into a new card in Mingle, or a new page on mw.org or what?

This seems to be about article text, or mainly about article text (articles imported from other wikis and so on).

The plan for the structured data project is to create Wikidata properties for legalese, install Wikibase on Commons (and possibly other wikis which have local images), make that Wikibase use Wikidata properties (and sometimes Wikidata items as values), create a new entity type called mediainfo (which is like a Wikibase item, but associated with a file), and add legal information to the mediainfo entries.

Part of that (the Wikidata properties) could be reused for articles and other non-file content - the source, license etc. properties are generic enough. However, if we want to use this structure to attribute files, we would either have to make mediainfo into some more generic thing that can be attached to any wiki page, or abuse the langlink/badge feature to serve a similar purpose. That is a major course correction; if we want to do something like that, that should be discussed (with the involvement of the Wikidata team) as soon as possible.

Thanks for the analysis, Gergo!  I was going to split Luis' proposal into a separate wiki page, but I see Nemo has linked to this page as the "Canonical page on the topic":
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Files_and_licenses_concept

Without a deep reading that I'm admittedly just not going to have time for, it's hard to tell how related the page that Nemo linked to is to the concepts that Luis is trying to capture.  Could someone (Nemo? Luis?) merge Luis's requirements into the "canonical page" to Luis' satisfaction, so I can delete most of the information from our backlog?  I'll keep the item on the MW Core backlog, since I don't know where else to put it, but it's probably going to be relatively low priority for that team.

Multimedia team and Wikidata team, could you make sure you're considering the requirements that Luis brought up as you build your solution?  Even if you decide to punt on some of the things that aren't strictly necessary for files, it's still good to make sure you don't paint us in a corner when if/when we do try to do something more sophisticated for articles.

One thing I'll note, though, before we get too complacent in thinking that files are somehow simpler than articles, we should consider these relatively common scenarios:
*  Group photo with potentially different per-person personality rights
*  PDF of a slide deck with many images
*  PDF of a Wikipedia article  :-)

Rob