This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Adding open-license text to Wikipedia page. |
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content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||
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There are two steps to translating this page to be able to use open license text on your language Wikipedia:
Change the links to Creative Commons to your language
Currently this resource only exists in English
Change the internal links to the pages in your own language
Change the name of the template to the corresponding template in your language (described below). Make sure all fields are created and clearly described.
Change the name of the template in the instructions an in the query to the name of the template in your language.
Change the internal links to the pages in your own language
Some languages already have a suitable template, many do not. Make sure to make the template compatible with Visual Editor.
If you have any questions about translating this page and the template message me
John Cummings ( talk) 21:32, 16 March 2018 (UTC)
(originally posted at meta:Grants talk:IdeaLab/An open license text reuse tool for the Visual Editor toolbar - I copied this here because it seems more relevant here. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:02, 21 July 2016 (UTC))
One way to do this on the wikitext side is wrapping the cited text into a pair of templates:
This would achieve a semantic markup in the wikitext (and with the span tags also in the rendered html - additionally users could tweak their stylesheet to highlight text that is marked up this way).
The advanage is that we can completely rely on citoid and the visual editor plugin would only assemble a bit of wikitext. One thing to keep in mind is that adding support to edit such blocks once they are inserted might be non trivial (visual editor would still show the opening and closimg templates though). -- Dschwen ( talk) 19:15, 22 June 2016 (UTC)
(originally posted at meta:Grants talk:IdeaLab/An open license text reuse tool for the Visual Editor toolbar - I copied this here because it seems more relevant here. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:02, 21 July 2016 (UTC))
Here are some precedents set by similar efforts:
Citizendium was an effort to create a Wikipedia equivalent with more control over who might edit. Licenses for both Citizendium and Wikipedia are compatible, and the projects exchanged a large amount of content. This category was created by TakuyaMurata in 2007 and might be the first effort to note on a large scale when Wikipedia included open text from another source. Takuya - do you remember anything earlier? Is this your original idea? I think that practices for using this category influenced how other projects addressed the issue.
The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannia is the newest editing in the public domain and was an early base for thousands of Wikipedia articles. The legacy of this text remains in English Wikipedia today. @ PBS:, you made this category in 2011. Do you know what people were doing to note use of this text before you made the category? To give credit with this system, one only puts this category on a page incorporating text.
This was a project of Wikisource:Wikisource:WikiProject Open Access most prominently led by Daniel Mietchen. It put open access articles in Wikisource, but also proposed to copy any or all of those articles into Wikipedia when appropriate. I am not sure if any best practices were confirmed in this effort, but the problem of giving notice of copied text was raised.
Note especially the Interactive Release Generator by @ FDMS4:. With either the standard en:WP:OTRS process or this new automated release form, text releases into Wikimedia projects are getting more attention. The time to establish best practices is becoming much more ripe now. Two very common cases which will become more frequent as OTRS releases become more common are release of text by email to put into Wikipedia articles and release of text of requests for Wikipedia talk pages to change Wikipedia articles in some way. Although these processes do not currently have a best :practice for managing text releases, through OTRS there are at least 50 requests daily which could be interpreted as, "put this text in Wikipedia, and apply an appropriate copyright with appropriate credit for the text release".
Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:19, 29 June 2016 (UTC)
{{ ConfirmationOTRS}} is a template which has been in use since February 2006 for sending evidence by email to Wikimedia reviewers that a certain text has a free license.
This system and WP:OTRS in general has its drawbacks, but a major advantage is that there are certain people who will only communicate by email. If the wiki community needs to negotiate a license with any such person or organization, then the OTRS system can help with that and this template is the current tool used to note that.
If this template is used, then that means that the guidelines on this "Adding open license text to Wikipedia" text should be followed, but additionally, there should be an OTRS ticket and this template should be pasted on the talk page of the article containing the externally produced free text. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:52, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
We usually say "free licenses" and "freely licensed", not "open". -- Nemo 16:19, 10 June 2017 (UTC)
I'm not sure I agree that we need to change from "open" to "free". I do however agree that this page confuses and intermixes the terms "openly licensed" and "open access" too much. For instance I would suggest to delete "(also known as Open Access)". Open licencing and open access are slightly different things. Open licence refers strictly just to the type of licensing of resource - it is clear and unambiguous. Open access is a lot more than that and in some cases "open access" [sic] resources are not openly licensed - e.g. it is sadly not uncommon to encounter journals that consider themselves open access, but which are licensed under CC BY-NC or some such non-open license. Thus to avoid ambiguity, with the aim of helping Wikipedia rules compliance, this page should refer to open licensing where possible, and perhaps even flag that some resources which may consider themselves "open access" do not in fact use open licensing. Metacladistics ( talk) 08:15, 25 September 2017 (UTC)
The page is very good for explaining to outsiders how to make their text open and free. Would it be appropriate to have a short section that did the same for images. (That is a euphemism for please could someone write a section) I am looking at academics that have a Wordpress page- and the average mobile phone user that uploads his photos onto social media such as Facebook. If there isn't a tag already written All the photos on my XXXXXX account are CC-BY-SA 4.0, which means you are free to use them anywhere with my blessing, providing I get a credit can we work one up? ClemRutter ( talk) 20:02, 24 September 2017 (UTC)
A couple of errors on the page:
Crow Caw 15:28, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
You can help to further develop the process in several areas:
Thanks
John Cummings ( talk) 15:30, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
See Policy / technical / other questions regarding links to the project namespace from articles and citation templates for a topic I started about this page at the Village pump (miscellaneous) - Paul T +/ C 17:11, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
I applied some updates to the Wikipedia:Adding open license text to Wikipedia/creating articles#Converting and adding open license text to Wikipedia section, following from a discussion at Talk:Children in emergencies and conflicts#Issues. Maybe these rewrites need to be discussed here (too), but for the time being, I just link to the discussion we're having at that article talk page, a discussion which prompted me to update the guidance. -- Francis Schonken ( talk) 10:31, 6 May 2018 (UTC)
Question: why is the guidance split up in subpages such as Wikipedia:Adding open license text to Wikipedia/creating articles? Guidelines should usually be coherent imho, which is afaics easier to realise when it's all on the same page. -- Francis Schonken ( talk) 07:18, 8 May 2018 (UTC)
@
Francis Schonken: Since your edits are proving controversial, would you be happy to undo them leave the page as it is until there's a consensus for the changes? As a step towards building that consensus, what do you envisage being the problem with mirroring in regards to copying open access material?
Richard Nevell (
talk)
21:11, 8 May 2018 (UTC)
I will describe below how in practice Francis Schonken updated BWV 769 in January 2018: he has misrepresented how that "updating" happened; the diffs are clear enough. I will add the diffs, bit by bit. Mathsci ( talk) 08:05, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
Timeline.
Summary. In 2009, during the period of advent, I created the article Canonic Variations. Prior to January 2018, it had been a stable article, similar to the series of articles I have written on Bach's sacred organ works. The same secondary sources and method of editing were used; similarly for Clavier-Übung III.
The previous policy for creating wikipedia articles from scratch makes a lot of sense. However, Francis Schonken's policy to include what he calls "updating" does not make any sense at all: once a roughly stable article has been created, it will evolve through cumulative and serendipitous edits. In the case of a specialist article, from a high-quality encyclopedic source, often one source is sufficient, depending on the context. That was certainly the case here.
Francis Schonken did not even have access to the "updated" source about which he complained (John Butt's German-language chapter on the Canonical Variations from Laaber Verlag.) Similarly his essay on "ownership" in his user talk page was unhelpful. Apart from a few commas and alignments of images, Francis Schonken contributed very little. Indeed his contribution seems on balance to be negative: he had to have it explained in detail why it made no sense to blank the text. That was already apparent in the 2009 article.
His habit of ignoring {{in-use}} tags was just one of several ways of evading WP:consensus. His confusion on the registration of the organ stops (Variatio IV) was not helpful at all. At some stage he decided to explain to an experienced editor how the preview button worked. At no stage did he make any major edits to the article.
This was one example of "updating" a wikipedia article. I think the previous rubric was fine: what Francis Schonken wrote later has no consensus and still makes very little sense after tweaking.
Mathsci ( talk) 12:58, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
Seems like the issues mentioned above remain as yet unaddressed, example: Talk:Access to information#Extreme bias. -- Francis Schonken ( talk) 11:44, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
Just a few observations
Still if is a nice page, obviously prepared for a specific clientele at a training session. Could you just divide it into two?
-- ClemRutter ( talk) 08:05, 8 May 2018 (UTC)
Note, I was able to track down some more information about the issues with the 4.0 license here: meta:Terms of use/Creative Commons 4.0. Apparently there was a dicussion in 2016 to "upgrade" the Wikimedia license from 3.0 to 4.0 but as far as I can tell after a whole bunch of well-intended but often misinformed discussion, nothing has happened since then... It looks like this isn't something that is still being considered, but if there is more info out there I'd be interested in seeing it! I agree with Clem though that it would be helpful if there was some kind of footnote or link in the instructions pointing to an explanation for why 4.0 text is not compatible with the current license. - Paul T +/ C 07:40, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
Material in the public domain also has a compatible (non)license and should be treated exactly as stated here. In the PD case, the attribution is needed to avoid plagiarism, not a copyright license violation, but the same process steps are needed. - Arch dude ( talk) 04:28, 2 June 2018 (UTC)
When adding open license text it is a good idea to capture the unmodified text in the history first, before modifying it. In the case of of a new article, this can be done as the first step fo article creation. You do need to add the attribution and some sort of "in process" template, but that's all. In the case of an addition to an existing article, the unmodified text can be added to the talk page or perhaps to a temporary page that can then be merge, preserving the history. The object of this exercise is to permit a later editor to see all the steps you took to get from the source to the article. - Arch dude ( talk) 04:34, 2 June 2018 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: Moved. ( non-admin closure) samee converse 18:29, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Adding open license text to Wikipedia →
Help:Adding open license text to Wikipedia – The "
Help:"
namespace is more appropriate for this content. My understanding is that all tutorials and "how-tos" that are not userspaced essays belong there. See a
similar move from
Wikipedia:Picture tutorial to
Help:Pictures. -
Paul
T
+/
C
19:18, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
Why is CC-BY-SA 4.0 not an acceptable licence for text? I can't seem to find any further information on this anywhere, seems like an arbitrary assertion...-- 176.250.94.164 ( talk) 22:39, 7 November 2019 (UTC)
I drew up these instructions for importing CC BY 4.0 material hosted in the GitHub repository for Microsoft's VBA documentation, into Wikibooks. Adding it here in case it is of use to others.
-- MarkJFernandes ( talk) 07:58, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
I would like to add a biography about rapper 00dereio to Wikipedia for Spotify and apple artists bios. 2601:140:C180:6270:B1F6:347A:2CD3:24DD ( talk) 16:29, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
I don't like how the statement in the sources doesn't say where the content was added. I mean this statement for example: :
When I come to an article years after that content was added it is quite possible that the text block in question is actually no longer there (e.g. if the article has been culled, condensed, split, or otherwise changed). Then that statement under "sources" just remains there but is no longer relevant. I think it's far better to use in-line citations like this:
This way, the licence info stays together with the content and won't get separated. EMsmile ( talk) 08:19, 8 February 2023 (UTC)
References
This is the
talk page for discussing improvements to the
Adding open-license text to Wikipedia page. |
|
![]() | This help page does not require a rating on Wikipedia's
content assessment scale. It is of interest to the following WikiProjects: | |||||||||||||
|
There are two steps to translating this page to be able to use open license text on your language Wikipedia:
Change the links to Creative Commons to your language
Currently this resource only exists in English
Change the internal links to the pages in your own language
Change the name of the template to the corresponding template in your language (described below). Make sure all fields are created and clearly described.
Change the name of the template in the instructions an in the query to the name of the template in your language.
Change the internal links to the pages in your own language
Some languages already have a suitable template, many do not. Make sure to make the template compatible with Visual Editor.
If you have any questions about translating this page and the template message me
John Cummings ( talk) 21:32, 16 March 2018 (UTC)
(originally posted at meta:Grants talk:IdeaLab/An open license text reuse tool for the Visual Editor toolbar - I copied this here because it seems more relevant here. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:02, 21 July 2016 (UTC))
One way to do this on the wikitext side is wrapping the cited text into a pair of templates:
This would achieve a semantic markup in the wikitext (and with the span tags also in the rendered html - additionally users could tweak their stylesheet to highlight text that is marked up this way).
The advanage is that we can completely rely on citoid and the visual editor plugin would only assemble a bit of wikitext. One thing to keep in mind is that adding support to edit such blocks once they are inserted might be non trivial (visual editor would still show the opening and closimg templates though). -- Dschwen ( talk) 19:15, 22 June 2016 (UTC)
(originally posted at meta:Grants talk:IdeaLab/An open license text reuse tool for the Visual Editor toolbar - I copied this here because it seems more relevant here. Blue Rasberry (talk) 20:02, 21 July 2016 (UTC))
Here are some precedents set by similar efforts:
Citizendium was an effort to create a Wikipedia equivalent with more control over who might edit. Licenses for both Citizendium and Wikipedia are compatible, and the projects exchanged a large amount of content. This category was created by TakuyaMurata in 2007 and might be the first effort to note on a large scale when Wikipedia included open text from another source. Takuya - do you remember anything earlier? Is this your original idea? I think that practices for using this category influenced how other projects addressed the issue.
The 1911 Encyclopedia Britannia is the newest editing in the public domain and was an early base for thousands of Wikipedia articles. The legacy of this text remains in English Wikipedia today. @ PBS:, you made this category in 2011. Do you know what people were doing to note use of this text before you made the category? To give credit with this system, one only puts this category on a page incorporating text.
This was a project of Wikisource:Wikisource:WikiProject Open Access most prominently led by Daniel Mietchen. It put open access articles in Wikisource, but also proposed to copy any or all of those articles into Wikipedia when appropriate. I am not sure if any best practices were confirmed in this effort, but the problem of giving notice of copied text was raised.
Note especially the Interactive Release Generator by @ FDMS4:. With either the standard en:WP:OTRS process or this new automated release form, text releases into Wikimedia projects are getting more attention. The time to establish best practices is becoming much more ripe now. Two very common cases which will become more frequent as OTRS releases become more common are release of text by email to put into Wikipedia articles and release of text of requests for Wikipedia talk pages to change Wikipedia articles in some way. Although these processes do not currently have a best :practice for managing text releases, through OTRS there are at least 50 requests daily which could be interpreted as, "put this text in Wikipedia, and apply an appropriate copyright with appropriate credit for the text release".
Blue Rasberry (talk) 14:19, 29 June 2016 (UTC)
{{ ConfirmationOTRS}} is a template which has been in use since February 2006 for sending evidence by email to Wikimedia reviewers that a certain text has a free license.
This system and WP:OTRS in general has its drawbacks, but a major advantage is that there are certain people who will only communicate by email. If the wiki community needs to negotiate a license with any such person or organization, then the OTRS system can help with that and this template is the current tool used to note that.
If this template is used, then that means that the guidelines on this "Adding open license text to Wikipedia" text should be followed, but additionally, there should be an OTRS ticket and this template should be pasted on the talk page of the article containing the externally produced free text. Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:52, 2 February 2017 (UTC)
We usually say "free licenses" and "freely licensed", not "open". -- Nemo 16:19, 10 June 2017 (UTC)
I'm not sure I agree that we need to change from "open" to "free". I do however agree that this page confuses and intermixes the terms "openly licensed" and "open access" too much. For instance I would suggest to delete "(also known as Open Access)". Open licencing and open access are slightly different things. Open licence refers strictly just to the type of licensing of resource - it is clear and unambiguous. Open access is a lot more than that and in some cases "open access" [sic] resources are not openly licensed - e.g. it is sadly not uncommon to encounter journals that consider themselves open access, but which are licensed under CC BY-NC or some such non-open license. Thus to avoid ambiguity, with the aim of helping Wikipedia rules compliance, this page should refer to open licensing where possible, and perhaps even flag that some resources which may consider themselves "open access" do not in fact use open licensing. Metacladistics ( talk) 08:15, 25 September 2017 (UTC)
The page is very good for explaining to outsiders how to make their text open and free. Would it be appropriate to have a short section that did the same for images. (That is a euphemism for please could someone write a section) I am looking at academics that have a Wordpress page- and the average mobile phone user that uploads his photos onto social media such as Facebook. If there isn't a tag already written All the photos on my XXXXXX account are CC-BY-SA 4.0, which means you are free to use them anywhere with my blessing, providing I get a credit can we work one up? ClemRutter ( talk) 20:02, 24 September 2017 (UTC)
A couple of errors on the page:
Crow Caw 15:28, 27 September 2017 (UTC)
You can help to further develop the process in several areas:
Thanks
John Cummings ( talk) 15:30, 20 November 2017 (UTC)
See Policy / technical / other questions regarding links to the project namespace from articles and citation templates for a topic I started about this page at the Village pump (miscellaneous) - Paul T +/ C 17:11, 13 April 2018 (UTC)
I applied some updates to the Wikipedia:Adding open license text to Wikipedia/creating articles#Converting and adding open license text to Wikipedia section, following from a discussion at Talk:Children in emergencies and conflicts#Issues. Maybe these rewrites need to be discussed here (too), but for the time being, I just link to the discussion we're having at that article talk page, a discussion which prompted me to update the guidance. -- Francis Schonken ( talk) 10:31, 6 May 2018 (UTC)
Question: why is the guidance split up in subpages such as Wikipedia:Adding open license text to Wikipedia/creating articles? Guidelines should usually be coherent imho, which is afaics easier to realise when it's all on the same page. -- Francis Schonken ( talk) 07:18, 8 May 2018 (UTC)
@
Francis Schonken: Since your edits are proving controversial, would you be happy to undo them leave the page as it is until there's a consensus for the changes? As a step towards building that consensus, what do you envisage being the problem with mirroring in regards to copying open access material?
Richard Nevell (
talk)
21:11, 8 May 2018 (UTC)
I will describe below how in practice Francis Schonken updated BWV 769 in January 2018: he has misrepresented how that "updating" happened; the diffs are clear enough. I will add the diffs, bit by bit. Mathsci ( talk) 08:05, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
Timeline.
Summary. In 2009, during the period of advent, I created the article Canonic Variations. Prior to January 2018, it had been a stable article, similar to the series of articles I have written on Bach's sacred organ works. The same secondary sources and method of editing were used; similarly for Clavier-Übung III.
The previous policy for creating wikipedia articles from scratch makes a lot of sense. However, Francis Schonken's policy to include what he calls "updating" does not make any sense at all: once a roughly stable article has been created, it will evolve through cumulative and serendipitous edits. In the case of a specialist article, from a high-quality encyclopedic source, often one source is sufficient, depending on the context. That was certainly the case here.
Francis Schonken did not even have access to the "updated" source about which he complained (John Butt's German-language chapter on the Canonical Variations from Laaber Verlag.) Similarly his essay on "ownership" in his user talk page was unhelpful. Apart from a few commas and alignments of images, Francis Schonken contributed very little. Indeed his contribution seems on balance to be negative: he had to have it explained in detail why it made no sense to blank the text. That was already apparent in the 2009 article.
His habit of ignoring {{in-use}} tags was just one of several ways of evading WP:consensus. His confusion on the registration of the organ stops (Variatio IV) was not helpful at all. At some stage he decided to explain to an experienced editor how the preview button worked. At no stage did he make any major edits to the article.
This was one example of "updating" a wikipedia article. I think the previous rubric was fine: what Francis Schonken wrote later has no consensus and still makes very little sense after tweaking.
Mathsci ( talk) 12:58, 10 May 2018 (UTC)
Seems like the issues mentioned above remain as yet unaddressed, example: Talk:Access to information#Extreme bias. -- Francis Schonken ( talk) 11:44, 14 February 2020 (UTC)
Just a few observations
Still if is a nice page, obviously prepared for a specific clientele at a training session. Could you just divide it into two?
-- ClemRutter ( talk) 08:05, 8 May 2018 (UTC)
Note, I was able to track down some more information about the issues with the 4.0 license here: meta:Terms of use/Creative Commons 4.0. Apparently there was a dicussion in 2016 to "upgrade" the Wikimedia license from 3.0 to 4.0 but as far as I can tell after a whole bunch of well-intended but often misinformed discussion, nothing has happened since then... It looks like this isn't something that is still being considered, but if there is more info out there I'd be interested in seeing it! I agree with Clem though that it would be helpful if there was some kind of footnote or link in the instructions pointing to an explanation for why 4.0 text is not compatible with the current license. - Paul T +/ C 07:40, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
Material in the public domain also has a compatible (non)license and should be treated exactly as stated here. In the PD case, the attribution is needed to avoid plagiarism, not a copyright license violation, but the same process steps are needed. - Arch dude ( talk) 04:28, 2 June 2018 (UTC)
When adding open license text it is a good idea to capture the unmodified text in the history first, before modifying it. In the case of of a new article, this can be done as the first step fo article creation. You do need to add the attribution and some sort of "in process" template, but that's all. In the case of an addition to an existing article, the unmodified text can be added to the talk page or perhaps to a temporary page that can then be merge, preserving the history. The object of this exercise is to permit a later editor to see all the steps you took to get from the source to the article. - Arch dude ( talk) 04:34, 2 June 2018 (UTC)
The result of the move request was: Moved. ( non-admin closure) samee converse 18:29, 4 March 2019 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Adding open license text to Wikipedia →
Help:Adding open license text to Wikipedia – The "
Help:"
namespace is more appropriate for this content. My understanding is that all tutorials and "how-tos" that are not userspaced essays belong there. See a
similar move from
Wikipedia:Picture tutorial to
Help:Pictures. -
Paul
T
+/
C
19:18, 25 February 2019 (UTC)
Why is CC-BY-SA 4.0 not an acceptable licence for text? I can't seem to find any further information on this anywhere, seems like an arbitrary assertion...-- 176.250.94.164 ( talk) 22:39, 7 November 2019 (UTC)
I drew up these instructions for importing CC BY 4.0 material hosted in the GitHub repository for Microsoft's VBA documentation, into Wikibooks. Adding it here in case it is of use to others.
-- MarkJFernandes ( talk) 07:58, 20 July 2020 (UTC)
I would like to add a biography about rapper 00dereio to Wikipedia for Spotify and apple artists bios. 2601:140:C180:6270:B1F6:347A:2CD3:24DD ( talk) 16:29, 3 September 2022 (UTC)
I don't like how the statement in the sources doesn't say where the content was added. I mean this statement for example: :
When I come to an article years after that content was added it is quite possible that the text block in question is actually no longer there (e.g. if the article has been culled, condensed, split, or otherwise changed). Then that statement under "sources" just remains there but is no longer relevant. I think it's far better to use in-line citations like this:
This way, the licence info stays together with the content and won't get separated. EMsmile ( talk) 08:19, 8 February 2023 (UTC)
References