Does Collections extension meet required licensing requirements?
We are considering whether to install the Collections extension on our wiki. To get a feel for the product of the extension, I created a small "book" of 3 articles from Wikipedia. After examining the result, I became concerned that the extension may not meet all of the licensing requirements for the content in the book.
At the end of the book, the extension cites the licenses for the images that appear in the collection and also specifies the text license. However, it doesn't actually include the licenses themselves or links to them (other than for the text license). For example, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 2.5 License specifies in section 4 (Restrictions), "You must include a copy of, or the Uniform Resource Identifier for, this License with every copy or phonorecord of the Work You distribute, publicly display, publicly perform, or publicly digitally perform." I included the Wikipedia article on Larry Sanger in a collection, the license for his picture is: "License: Creative Commons Attribution-Sharealike 2.5". Nowhere in the collection does this license or a URI to it appear. Consequently, I wonder if the "book" satisfies the terms of the license.
I asked a more general version of this question on Mediawiki-l but no one responded.
You may want to know of the following problem which seems related:
- Bug 28064 - Collection extension needs some way to inform original authors of a work
Thanks.
I'm aware of two other licence problems:
- Try making a book out of en:Taz people, or simply generate a PDF of the article. It seems that the extension tries to remove bots from the list of contributors, probably since their participation is below the threshold of originality so that they don't need attribution. The extension seems to try to exclude bots by searching for user names containing the word "bot", but note that the article has major contributions by en:User:Abbott, a normal user. Since the word "bot" appears in the middle of this user's user name, he isn't credited, clearly against the licence's attribution requirements. I tried to point this out at m:Book tool/Feedback#Bug: User with major contributions not credited but I'm not sure if this is the right place. Maybe it should go to bugzilla: instead?
- No verbatim copy of the GNU Free Document Licence is included on English Wikipedia (but it seems to be included on German Wikipedia). GFDL doesn't allow any URL – you must include the full licence.
