CZ Talk:License Essays/Stephen Ewen

Comment

Overall I thought this essay was excellent

Full array of Licenses

<quote> There is no reason whatsoever to believe that CZ cannot host material under the full array of copyrights and licenses. Doing so would increase both the overall amount and quality of our content, in fact. </quote>

I read that with very great interest, but not sure how it could work out in practice for an open content project. Could you develop that a little perhaps ( FYI I think it may be possible to reconcile, but how needs to be made more clear because it's an important point IMV. I only have a hazy idea ATM how it could be done, but think it should be possible) —  Luke Brandt 12:18, 4 November 2007 (CST)

Reply

Here's one idea. It will take some development work, as I've said.

Whenever one begins a new page http://en.citizendium.org/wiki/New_article they are brought to a redesigned MediaWiki:Noarticletext a lot like CZ:Upload-Wizard (which is still under development right now). They click on the appropriate link: "Starting article from Wikipedia material"; Starting article from University Open CourseWare material"; etc. The page they start will have a unique appearance depending upon license, a lot like this example of a PD page, and that appearance is not editable except by sysops (there will be cases where the text of an article will be so transformed the license changes).

So every page will be licensed and have a certain unique appearance. While it is being drafted, a notice like the below will appear atop the page (let's say in this example a CZ article began life at WP):

Important note: This article is licensed under the GNU Public License. All text added, whether your own or from another source, must be licensed the same. All media added must allow both commercial and derivative uses, as far as possible.

After an article is approved, that notice will move to the draft page and will also appear in much smaller text at the bottom of the approved article, if it is still true.

I think you can see the basic pattern.

Stephen Ewen 19:28, 4 November 2007 (CST)