Neil Kandalgaonkar wrote:
I think this is a great start and I am willing to start drawing up plans about this on-wiki somewhere. I am rather slammed with pressing deadlines right now but I just wanted to contribute a little to the discussion.
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Database schema: Add a "licensing" table to the db with the following columns - 1) revision_or_image, 2) revision_id, 3) image_id, 4) content_source, 5) license_id, 6) user_id.
The first three columns identify the revision or image to which the licensing data is associated.
revision_or_image is a wart, as others pointed out. Each image has its own dedicated wiki page so it is probably more useful to use that.
But then you encounter a GFDL / CC-BY-SA description of a CC-BY-any reupload of a PD image.
Otherwise your schema is already similar to work I've been doing with UploadWizard, building on typical licensing workflows and templates.
There are "Deeds" which are composed of:
- Source -- some information that tells us where this came from.
Currently we use a variety of wiki templates here. It could be a URL, a bibliographic record, anything.
- Author, which again is rather free-form. It can be a particular user
on the wiki. But it also common to use a Creator template for a famous artist, or to simply write in the name in plaintext.
- License, which is just a template license, but in this new world
should be something like license_id.
If we want to get more structured, it would be nice to also record the Uploader, since that is not the same thing as the Author or Source. Things may get complex when image replacement happens as you noted.
That would be already stored in the upload log.
Right now our major use case is when the uploader is the author. But it will not always be so. In the case where the uploader asserts that someone else has okayed their work to be distributed under a free license, we want the author in question, or OTRS, to be able to check off that this was verified. OTRS has a workflow like this already, and in the Multimedia project we had plans to simplify this but I'm afraid it's unlikely I will get to that that soon.
Note that another common case is that the author was the uploader on a different wiki.
PS: I apologize if the threading is screwed up here -- WMF mail was down for a few hours so I missed this message.
Seems well-threaded here :)