Rowan Collins wrote:
The ideal solution would be [...] to store licence
information as
language-independent metadata, descriptions in multiple languages, and
use something like the "content negotiation" in HTTP to determine what
to include or display... :)
Sounds good to me. ;-)
Seriously, image licences are meta-data, and should be treated as such
(as should lots of other stuff - interwikis, categories, etc.), and we
on the Wikimedia Research Team^WNetwork are looking into the
plausibility of modifying MediaWiki to have meta-data accessed separately.
Quite apart from anything else, the use of proper meta-data for
licensing would (will? ;-)) allow useful queries to be made, such as
"grab articles in the category 'British monarchs' where all elements are
either Public Domain worldwide, GFDL, or CC-BY", which would allow
semi-automatic creation of non-infringing items for publication anywhere
(though there still might be problems, such as local blasphemy laws,
etc., which would be difficult to cover).
Note that this would need a quite advanced tagging system (c.f. the
discussion on wikien-l over the fact that our 'PD' images of Lindisfarne
scrolls are only PD in the United States, and are infringing in the UK),
which would be, erm, 'fun'.
Yours,
--
James D. Forrester
Wikimedia : [[W:en:User:Jdforrester|James F.]]
E-Mail : james(a)jdforrester.org
IM (MSN) : jamesdforrester(a)hotmail.com
