Am 10.10.2008 um 21:22 schrieb Erik Moeller:
2008/10/10 Derbeth derbeth@wp.pl:
I wonder about the legal aspects. In my opinion, when you create a ready-to-print version, you have to attach the text of GFDL license to it - directly, not as a link. Like it is done in http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Image:LaTeX.pdf.
As Erik wrote: This is already implemented (either a title of an article or a URL to some license text can be set in LocalSettings.php), but it's currently not configured.
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.
All this could be handled via microformats, even inside of templates, but the main point is that any kind of new technique has to be enforced, ideally via MediaWiki software itself: In the commons wikis there are some conventions that can be used in software by people/ companies like us (although we have to work with hacks and workarounds), but oftentimes, in wikis with smaller communities this information doesn't even exist at all.
-- Johannes Beigel