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RFC (WIP): Overhaul of licensing system to support per page licensing
Closed, DeclinedPublic

Description

Currently licensing is a house of cards.

  • In commons, images can have different licenses
  • Sites can configure licenses
  • WikimediaMessages can update licenses
  • Editors can override licenses in messages
  • Pages can have multiple licenses (e.g. Wikidata)
  • MobileFrontend shows different license text to desktop

Speaking @Slaporte we are interested in being able to:

  • license newly edited content with cc by sa 4 while maintaining the same license for older content.
  • license urls would be specific to the current language

With the current ecosystem being able to do this is pretty complicated.
We would need to

  • Show cc 3 license for all content edited before date A (including cached HTML)
  • Show new license for all content edited after date B
  • Old revisions would show the old license

We'd like to make requests like this from legal much more straightforward.

One way we could achieve this is via a page prop content-license which is an integer which represents a license stored in a constant somewhere.

Any thoughts welcomed. I've added a handful of people that I feel may have good views in this area, but please do broaden the audience!

Event Timeline

@ovasileva legal would like this change to happen as soon as possible after our already scheduled work, but the first step is to size it and then give them a sense of when we think is realistic. @Jdlrobson and @kaldari have some ideas about what this would entail.

JKatzWMF changed the task status from Open to Stalled.Jan 27 2017, 12:56 AM
JKatzWMF assigned this task to Slaporte.

@Slaporte this is stalled on getting the mobile "text" from you and the date you want us to use as the changing point.

I addition to the current footer, messages, there are 'vague' footer (revisions on web pages) and 'after' pages. It would be great to have a matrix of mobile and desktop for each.

Here is the text I have for desktop as the tentative text for the vague pages:

  • Text is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License: BY-SA 4.0 if edited after [DATE], and BY-SA 3.0 if edited before that. Additional terms may apply. By using this site, you agree to the Terms of Use and Privacy Policy.

    Wikipedia® is a registered trademark of the Wikimedia Foundation, Inc., a non-profit organization.

Can you post them to this ticket?

Aklapper changed the task status from Stalled to Open.Nov 27 2021, 4:02 PM

I don't see anything stalled here per definition, but it's unclear anyway which codebase(s) this would even be about? Should this task be declined?

Declining as task author. @Slaporte please reach out to @ovasileva if there's anything needed here any more, but I've not heard anything about moving to "cc by sa 4" recently so don't think this is a priority any longer.