On Fri, 10 Sep 2010 23:11:27 +0000, Dan Nessett wrote: > We are currently attempting to refactor some specific modifications to > the standard MW code we use (1.13.2) into an extension so we can upgrade > to a more recent maintained version. One modification we have keeps a > flag in the revisions table specifying that article text was imported > from WP. This flag generates an attribution statement at the bottom of > the article that acknowledges the import. > > I don't want to start a discussion about the various legal issues > surrounding text licensing. However, assuming we must acknowledge use of > licensed text, a legitimate technical issue is how to associate state > with an article in a way that records the import of licensed text. I > bring this up here because I assume we are not the only site that faces > this issue. > > Some of our users want to encode the attribution information in a > template. The problem with this approach is anyone can come along and > remove it. That would mean the organization legally responsible for the > site would entrust the integrity of site content to any arbitrary > author. We may go this route, but for the sake of this discussion I > assume such a strategy is not viable. So, the remainder of this post > assumes we need to keep such licensing state in the db. > > After asking around, one suggestion was to keep the licensing state in > the page_props table. This seems very reasonable and I would be > interested in comments by this community on the idea. Of course, there > has to be a way to get this state set, but it seems likely that could be > achieved using an extension triggered when an article is edited. > > Since this post is already getting long, let me close by asking whether > support for associating licensing information with articles might be > useful to a large number of sites. If so, the perhaps it belongs in the > core.
One thing I haven't seen so far (probably because it doesn't belong on Wikitech) is a discussion of the policy requirements. In open source software development, you have to carry forward licenses even if you substantially change the code content. The only way around this is a "clean room" implementation (e.g., how BSD Unix got around AT&T's original licensing for Unix). Is this also true for textual content? If so, then once you import such content into an article you are obliged to carry forward any licensing conditions on that import on for all subsequent revisions. Where is the proper place to discuss these kinds of questions? -- -- Dan Nessett _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
