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