Re: Dual-licensed wikibooks

Ah, the ever wished-for technical solution. This is a problem not just
> for Wikibooks but for all WMF projects. There just plain isn't an easy
> automated way to extract information about the contribution history
> into an easy-to-print format. GFDL does require we attribute our
> authors, and at the moment we (the royal "we" for all WMF
> contributors) are hoping that our difficult-to-parse history pages
> satisfy this requirement.
> 
> 

can i suggest something I know will be fruitless and i apologise
knowingly in advance but i feel a little compelled to suggest it
anyway...mediawiki might not be the right technology for wikibooks...i
would think it might be a bit sane to actually address this issue, even
just on the 'what if' level... i understand the institutional and legacy
issues however it might be an interesting academic excercise to consider
_not_ bending mediawiki to solve something when it is clearly not
designed for book content...instead take the issue through a technical
'needs' process and look for technical solutions that suit these
needs...



adam



> 

> 
> Getting attribution information for authors, both authors of content
> and images, included into our distributable versions (PDF and Print
> versions) is a must, for the GFDL or any other copyleft license that
> we use. This is a feature that we should demand be included in the PDF
> extension that is being tested right now. I agree with darklama that
> we can't really move forward on any issue until this most basic
> requirement is satisfied from a technical perspective.
> 
> > One possible solution to this could be to take the same attitude towards
> > media as some would like to take towards dual licensing books. Require
> > that at a minimum all media must be licensed under the GFDL or allow
> > relicensing under the GFDL only.
> 
> Here I think is my biggest objection, and I think I've been unable to
> describe it properly heretofore. Dual licenses are typically either-or
> situations, options are presented and the reuser may select one, the
> other, or both at their discretion. What we would have to do on
> Wikibooks to allow dual-licensing of books is not only to specify what
> licenses were the available options, but also we must mandate
> additional terms: That the entire multi-licensing scheme must be
> preserved on Wikibooks for compatibility, that reusers may select
> either-or license (except reusers on Wikibooks itself).
> 
> Imagine that we have a book that is GFDL+CC-BY-SA-3.0. Content reusers
> on a different website take our book, make modifications to it, and
> release the book under the GFDL only. Now, those changes cannot be
> folded back into our book because the contributions do not allow
> CC-BY-SA-3.0. We then lose access to changes made to our content
> downstream, the exact situation that copyleft licenses try to prevent.
> In the case we have now our content is always GFDL, downstream
> derivatives are always GFDL, users and reusers always have to use the
> GFDL, everything works seemlessly.
> 
> > Another solution is to just have a tool to generate the attributions
> > for all media used in a book. Question though is what is needed to
> > attribute media used in a book? The media filenames aren't
> > necessarily going to be included with every use of the media within
> > the book to make it easy to associate license with media. Does this mean
> > in order to acknowledge the contributors of a media and the license used
> > that the media would need to be a literal part of the attribution? Does
> > every media that uses the same license still need a separate
> > attribution? Would separate attributions be needed if the book and all
> > media used in the book used the same license? Would this still be a
> > problem if the book and all the media in the book used the same license?
> 
> Great questions, all. I submit for the consideration of all discussion
> participants now some of the work I've attempted to do on the
> [[Control Systems]] book. Take a look at this page, for reference:
> 
> http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Control_Systems/Licensing
> 
> This is the most that I've seen in any book to try and satisfy the
> differing license requirements of our books and our image media, and
> it still isn't enough. For most licenses, we would need to include
> attribution lists not just for the pages in the text, but also the
> images. Some other licenses also require that we include the text of
> those licenses with their respective images in the distributed copy of
> the book.
> 
> What we really need is something to standardize and automate this
> process. Some kind of MediaWiki-based technical solution would be
> ideal for this, but some kind of extension or JavaScript or whatever
> would be fine too.
> 
> --Andrew Whitworth
> 
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-- 
Adam Hyde
FLOSS Manuals

http://www.flossmanuals.net
+ 31 6 2808 7108

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