New subject: License information (was: PDF/Collection feature live on de.wikibooks)

14 Oct 2008

Am 10.10.2008 um 21:22 schrieb Erik Moeller:
...
  2008/10/10 Derbeth &lt;derbeth(a)wp.pl&gt;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