BITPlan waihekepedia Wiki talk:Community Portal

I'd love to contribute to Waihekepedia, but firstly i'd like a more concrete statement about what license my content would be covered by/under. This page: Waihekepedia:General disclaimer suggests that you're using the GFDL, but it also seems pretty much the stock page that comes with a MediaWiki install. Will content in Waihekepedia be licensed under the GFDL or could the community also consider using the the CC-By-SA license instead that is used by many similar projects, notably WikiTravel? Personally I think that the CC-BY-SA is more in line with this kind of project and it would be good to think/discuss this in a bit more detail first before too much content is entered. Countrymike 11:08, 31 August 2007 (NZST)

Well Country Mike - we'll obviously have to educate ourselves about the differences between the two licenses.

GFDL

CC by SA ? all I can find out is that it must be some variation of the Creative Commons license

Creative Commons

Can you help clarify this for everyone please ?

Licensing for Waihekepedia - Discussion

Well... ok, here we go (again)I guess... :-) but it's important stuff if we're really a "community" because the community may actually be much larger than us in the short and hopefully the long term and getting the licensing right at the start helps sustain the type of information we're gathering, aggregating, creating here and can make that information freely available for as wide a use as possible. There are two licenses used for textual works that embody what is called 'copyleft', the GFDL which the wiki is currently using but perhaps just by default as the MediaWiki software that runs this wiki is essentially a product of Wikipedia (which uses the GFDL), and the Creative Commons Attribution Share-Alike license, commonly referred to as CC-By-SA. Wikipedia uses the GFDL but primarily because when Wikipedia started there was no other option; the Creative Commons wasn't around yet. The GFDL is not a very good license for content of the nature of a Wikipedia, but it was all they had at the time so now they're pretty much stuck with it. A better license is perhaps the CC-By-SA, which you can see here: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

For a more detailed look at perhaps why these licensing issues are important it might be worth taking a look at the Free Cultural Works Definition and seeing whether the values of Waihekepedia align. Also take a look at the Wikitravel site's explanation of their licensing: http://wikitravel.org/en/Wikitravel:How_to_re-distribute_Wikitravel_content

One of the difficulties with the GFDL is that is requires that texts that are printed out be printed out with a copy of the license -- which is about 10 pages of semi-legalese ramblings, which doesn't make much sense for small articles that you may want in an information center in Artworks. The CC-By-SA is really designed more for this type of content, whereas the GFDL is originally for larger software documentation.

As you might have guessed I've got a bit of experience in this Wiki thing -- it's pretty much one of my great passions in life and you've just managed to beat me to the punch on creating one for Waiheke, so if you'd prefer to have a chat about all this in the Lazy Lounge say, then i'd be keen on that as well and I may know a few others ... not that I know who you are because you haven't filled in your user page and you don't sign your posts ;-) Countrymike 15:01, 31 August 2007 (NZST)

The Creative Commons is working with Te Whāinga Aronui The Council for the Humanities to create New Zealand jurisdiction-specific licenses from the generic Creative Commons licenses. We could be one of the first sites to use the new NZ Ported CC-By-SA and possibly participate in the process. How will the few people who are currently on participating on the wiki come to some concensus on these types of decisions? It doesn't seem like something to just "be bold" about, but it's important to get it sorted at the start and make people aware of the license that their content is under. Currently it's a bit hidden. Countrymike 08:32, 1 September 2007 (NZST)

Morena Countrymike, I'd love to have a chat and The Lazy Lounge seems as good a place as any. I am guessing that at the moment you are not in the possession of a Tardis and as I see you posted at 3am that you are still away. Also Dalek Snowden's presence on the island for his mayoral campaign may make landing a Tardis near the Lazy Lounge somewhat dangerous at the moment.

In the interim would it pay to remove the licensing section. Yes it is the standard mediawiki install. If it is your esteemed recomendation that we should adopt CC then I am prepared to put it to the vote.

When I came up with the idea of waihekepedia the last thing on my mind was something I owned. This has to be owned by the people of Waiheke. Let us just say that we are guardians of the project until such time as an entity evolves that can take it over on behalf of the community.

Feel free to email me at onetnagi@gmail.com, I'd give you my 1-800 number but it appears broken.

Tihare 10:04, September 1, 2007 (NZST)

Tihare: I'd recommend that we do go with the CC-By-SA license and i can talk a bit more why over a flat white at some point. My timestamps are off because i'm currently in the US on a bit of a holiday but will be back later next week. We can keep a watch on when the license is ported for NZ then move to that... be one of the first... that would be great. There is a way to add a license note to all pages on MediaWiki it's a setting somewhere in Localsetting.php or somewhere I seem to remember but when I get back I'll look into it a bit more and help draft some stuff on it. If we do move to CC-By-SA it also means that I can bring over some of the wiki newbie tutorials that I've worked on at WikiEducator to help people get their feet wet in the wiki environment. I'd also be keen to see if we could arrange some free workshops; i've recently run one for a number of Pacific Island educators, teaching them how to use MediaWiki and it went down a charm. We have started a project on WikiEducator called Wiki Pasifika (see: http://www.wikieducator.org/Wiki_Pasifika) for them. Anyways, obviously I'm excited about the project ... i've had my own little page on Waiheke going for some time on Auckland.Wiki (see: http://auckland.wiki.org.nz/Waiheke_Island) but one dedicated to Waiheke is a great idea. Countrymike 14:48, 1 September 2007 (NZST)

Wow Mike - let me just say first off how delighted we all are to have your input - forgive my non signed posts (lack of experience) and empty user page (lack of time so far) - I'm getting to grips with the etiquette etc slowly and thanks also for your input on licensing - I concur with Tihare and yourself and look forward to a Lazy Lounger catch up Cheers bruced

James: Not quite sure how this all works and may not have as much time to find out as I would like, but please consider letting me know by email or phone when you are heading to the lazy. I would love to connect.. James Samuel. 8737 and jms@ihug.co.nz

Time for a captcha?

spam seems to be increasing quite steadily -- which could be read as a somewhat good sign I suppose -- someone's paying attention. Is it time to install a captcha? bruce? anyone against it? it can make getting an account a bit more difficult. Countrymike 20:29, 9 October 2007 (NZDT)

I don't have a problem with a captcha, although there should be a mechanism for blind users to email someone to request an account. However, the spam is low volume so far, so I'm not sure if its a bot or a person.

Given the response times to spam so far, we'd be in real trouble if a bot started pumping out several pages a second. The solution to this would be to have a lawbot watching for excessive edit rates and blocking any such account until an admin can investigate. As far as I know, there is no such feature built in to MediaWiki, but there are such bots running on Wikipedia and we could probably borrow one. However, database structures have changed over the years, and I don't know if a current bot will run correctly on such an old version of MediaWiki.

I'd also kind of prefer to avoid if it's still maintanable. I've seen on wikieducator just how much of a barrier they can be to newbies, so i'd still prefer to not to have to implement if we can avoid it. Countrymike 22:07, 9 October 2007 (NZDT)

Is there any procedure set up to become an admin here? I'd like to be more effective than just blanking spam pages.-Gadfium 21:37, 9 October 2007 (NZDT)

Gadfium: I've made you sysop. I've known Gadfiums work and contributions to Wikipedia for a long time and can vouch for his being added to the Sysop group. Countrymike 22:07, 9 October 2007 (NZDT)