On 29.01.2009, at 13:48, Brianna Laugher wrote:
Because different wikis implement licenses in different ways (ie
there
are no naming conventions for license templates), I am not sure this license information would belong in MediaWiki core.
It could be opt-in for each wiki, but MediaWiki API is already there and would be a perfect way to make this information available.
Of course one has to think about the kind of data and the format -- e.g. Magnus has, and you mention:
On Wikimedia Commons a little bit of work has been done to this end: http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:Commons_API
We've been aware of this page and Magnus' implementation, and we think it looks really good!
The information is (AFAIK) scraped from the rendered XHTML of articles. This could be done in a less error-prone way (and more efficiently) if the data would be stored and accessed via database in some way. Of course this would require some discussion, formal decisions and code changes. But as I stated in an earlier post: I think MediaWiki is so widely used by people who want to share and collaborate on free content, that it's not too farfetched to build some "license infrastracture" into the software itself.
I would be interested to know if further development of the Commons API would be "heading in the right direction" for PediaPress.
It's definitely heading in the right direction! It should become "more official" though. :-)
-- Johannes