[Wikitech-l] Maintenance of WMF project footers

[Zhou Zhou]

Hi,

Would anyone know who maintains the footers on our projects below linking
to our policies and terms? The second footer especially appears it might be
automatically set somewhere.


   - Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike
   License
   
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License>;
   additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms
   of Use <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Terms_of_Use> and Privacy
   Policy <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy>. Wikipedia®
   is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
   <https://www.wikimediafoundation.org/>, a non-profit organization.


   - Privacy policy <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Privacy_policy>
   - About Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:About>
   - Disclaimers
   <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:General_disclaimer>
   - Contact Wikipedia <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Contact_us>
   - Developers
   <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:MyLanguage/How_to_contribute>
   - Cookie statement
   <https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Cookie_statement>
   - Mobile view
   
<https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Main_Page=toggle_view_mobile>


-- 
Thanks!

Zhou

Zhou Zhou
Legal Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
149 New Montgomery Street, 6th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
zz...@wikimedia.org

NOTICE: This message might have confidential or legally privileged
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Yandex?

[Zhou Zhou]

>
> Date: Fri, 13 Nov 2015 09:21:15 +0530
> From: Runa Bhattacharjee <rbhattachar...@wikimedia.org>
> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Yandex?
> Message-ID:
> <
> cae7qtsq2l0ntmofdjuwbpmtnhj+r8etm6wqa+p+ft2+5w0o...@mail.gmail.com>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
> On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 12:58 AM, Marcin Cieslak <sa...@saper.info> wrote:
> >
> >
> > (How) are we going to meet this requirement?
> >
> >
> Hello,
> Specifics about this can be seen at:
>
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation/Machine_Translation/Yandex#Summary_of_terms_of_Yandex_agreement
> Thanks
> Runa
> --
> Language Engineering Manager
> Outreach and QA Coordinator
> Wikimedia Foundation


For those of you interested in this, you can take a look at the blog post
<https://blog.wikimedia.org/2015/11/11/content-translation-3-wikipedia-articles/>
announcing
our use of Yandex (It's in the "Improvements to machine translation"
section).  The post also provides links to various pages with more details
about this project, including the write-up of why we are using Yandex:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation/Documentation/FAQ#Yandex_is_not_based_on_open_source_software._Why_are_we_using_it.
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Content_translation/Documentation/FAQ#Yandex_is_not_based_on_open_source_software._Why_are_we_using_it.3F>

Among other things, our agreement allows us to maintain the CC license of
all translated content and we are not required to provide attribution to
Yandex like their TOU states.   Yandex is also not charging us for the
service.

Thanks,

Zhou


-- 

Zhou Zhou
Legal Counsel
Wikimedia Foundation
149 New Montgomery Street, 6th Floor
San Francisco, CA 94105
zz...@wikimedia.org

NOTICE: This message might have confidential or legally privileged
information in it. If you have received this message by accident, please
delete it and let us know about the mistake. As an attorney for the
Wikimedia Foundation, for legal/ethical reasons I cannot give legal advice
to, or serve as a lawyer for, community members, volunteers, or staff
members in their personal capacity. For more on what this means, please see
our legal disclaimer
<https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Legal_Disclaimer>.
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Short license blocks

[Zhou Zhou]

Hi Stephen,

Yes, generally you can shorten it as long as it is still easily readable by
humans and the linked references contains all the required copyright and
licensing information (note my response below was meant as a general
example for MediaWiki based on best practices rather than advice on the
specific language we must use).  For example, while removing the Copyright
word with © might shorten things, it might make it harder for someone to
search for the copyright information via the word "Copyright".  As a
certain point, making the header more concise might no longer be worth the
cost to user comprehension.

Thanks,

Zhou

Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2015 17:21:53 -0600
> From: Stephen Niedzielski 
> To: Wikimedia developers 
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Short license blocks
> Message-ID:
> 

Re: [Wikitech-l] Short license blocks

[Zhou Zhou]

Hi everyone,

Thanks to Gergo for bringing up this issue.  Everyone has raised good
points and I just want to link to existing guidance from the Software
Freedom Law Center
<https://softwarefreedom.org/resources/2012/ManagingCopyrightInformation.html>
on
best practices for developers to address the problem of long license and
copyright headers by linking to external files.   As noted in the guidance
document, by referencing the appropriate information files located in a
centralized location, not only do we reduce clutter in the header but we
also increase maintainability of license and copyright info.

Therefore for the header, as an example, we could have something like this:

>
> This file is part of the MediaWiki Project.  Copyright 2015 The MediaWiki
> Project Developers.
>
> For full copyright information and for the licensing terms governing the
> project and all its files, see the COPYING file at the top-level directory
> of this distribution and at
> https://github.com/wikimedia/mediawiki/blob/master/COPYING.


where in turn the COPYING file could contain references to the updated list
of authors, a description of the project, and the licensing information.

As to the specifics of SPDX use for all our projects and licenses, we will
have to do a little more research on this.  Happy to talk off-thread about
this as well.

Thanks,

Zhou



> From: Tyler Romeo <tylerro...@gmail.com>
> Date: Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 12:03 PM
> Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] Short license blocks
> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org>
>
>
> The Apache license, which is also permissive, has a similar recommended
> file header.
>
> I'd say we just standardize on having the warranty disclaimer and license
> notice in every file. It's an easy approach to make sure somebody reading
> the file can easily tell the license without having to maintain
> comprehensive authorship information in every file.
> On Oct 27, 2015 14:17, "Ryan Kaldari" <rkald...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
> > I was saying that we could go ahead and make this the standard for
> non-GPL
> > MediaWiki code (basically, the few MIT licensed extensions). I'm not sure
> > if the advantage of doing that would outweigh the disadvantage of having
> a
> > non-standard standard though.
> >
> > On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 11:06 AM, Tyler Romeo <tylerro...@gmail.com>
> > wrote:
> >
> > > Are you saying adopting the short license blocks? Or the MIT license?
> > > Because I'm not sure how the licenses of extensions would affect the
> > > license headers in core.
> > > On Oct 27, 2015 12:43, "Ryan Kaldari" <rkald...@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > > 
> > > > I totally support switching to license identifiers instead of
> headers,
> > > > provided that we also switch our licensing from GPL to MIT or BSD ;)
> > > > 
> > > >
> > > > On a serious note, we do have a fair number of extensions that are
> MIT
> > > > Licensed and could go ahead and adopt this (
> > > > https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:MIT_licensed_extensions).
> > > >
> > > >
> > > > On Tue, Oct 27, 2015 at 3:44 AM, Gergo Tisza <gti...@wikimedia.org>
> > > wrote:
> > > >
> > > > > In a recent blog post ( http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=6867 ) ESR
> writes:
> > > > >
> > > > > High on my list of Things That Annoy Me When I Hack is sourcefiles
> > that
> > > > > > contain huge blobs of license text at the top. That is valuable
> > > > territory
> > > > > > which should be occupied by a header comment explaining the code,
> > > not a
> > > > > > boatload of boilerplate that I’ve seen hundreds of times before.
> > > > >
> > > > >
> > > > > ...and then goes on to explain using SPDX identifiers to refer to
> > > > licenses,
> > > > > which would look something like this:
> > > > >
> > > > > /* Copyright 2015 by XYZ
> > > > >  * SPDX-License-Identifier: GPL-2.0+
> > > > >  */
> > > > >
> > > > > Any objections to making that the new standard / replacing existing
> > > > blocks
> > > > > with this? It would make the PHP files a little more readable.
> > > > > ___
> > > > > Wikitech-l mailing list
> > > > > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org
> > > > > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
> > > &