Licensing

This article is about three aspects of Licensing:

Licensing in general
Licensing as it applies to software
Licensing (attribution, etc.) of content/works as it is implemented in MediaWiki system.

Licensing in General[edit | edit source]

Problematic. Expensive. Inhibits creativity and entrepreneurship.

Licensing in Software[edit | edit source]

Although there are several advantages to using Free Software, one of the biggest and most obvious advantages is the fact that the licensing is 'free'. This means that you as an organization can spend a LOT less money and time ensuring licensing compliance. There are still compliance issues, but it shouldn't be too difficult. The GPL is the best software license. (There are of course nuances. For example, the GNU Affero license is the best for software providing a service across the network.) Use the GPL. If you choose some other license for your software, you risk making your software incompatible with GPL software; you take away rights for your users and ultimately threaten the longevity and usefulness of your software. In case you do not use the GPL, you will likely need to spend all kinds of money on legal fees and 'compliance' audits. See Licensing/software for more background and detail.

Licensing of Wiki content[edit | edit source]

The Wikipedia project underwent a licensing update in 2008/2009 from GFDL to dual-licensing scheme including the non-compatible CC-BY-SA.

In 2016, I'm noticing that there are some quirks in the software that I'm still investigating, so I've got notes here. Basically, I want to simply figure out whether there are any issues to implementors / site Administrators. When setting up a fresh install of MediaWiki; or upgrading a previous installation; is there anything to do with regard to the licensing templates or interface messages so that Special:Upload "just works"? One oddity that I found was that there were a bunch of "self-published" options available in the licensing dropdown, however they rely on a template named 'self' which was not present in this wiki. It is not a trivial exercise to export/import that template from mediawiki.org nor wikipedia.com. Because of the complex nature of these licensing templates, it is not possible to "copy" the template text.

Ref:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Configuring_file_uploads Documentation on configuring file uploads (no discussion of licenses)
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Manual:Configuration_settings#Uploads Configuration settings related to uploads
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:File_copyright_tags/Comprehensive Comprehensive info on copyright tags used in the Wikipedia project
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Licensing_update
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Self
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Self/doc
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_MediaWiki_Core_Team/Backlog#Structured_license_metadata (off the priority list for Core team)
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T100335 A bunch of issues being tracked related to this
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/License_integration_MediaWiki last editted in 2014
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Files_and_licenses_concept Concept elaboration

Compare:

Solution[edit | edit source]

The simplest solution I found was to export (using mw:Special:Export) the category 'mw:Category:License templates' from mediawiki.org. The category includes 30+ templates and modules. Be sure to tick the box that says "Include templates". This will generate an xml file for download. Then, import that file (using Special:Import) on your wiki (as admin user).

Note to self: look at the https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:UploadWizard for ways to improve https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Html2Wiki in terms of incorporating license templates into the extension.