On Sun, 2025-07-20 at 20:08 +0100, Andrew Sayers wrote:
> I haven't contributed much to Debian beyond editing some pages on the existing
> wiki, but I'm very interested in a MediaWiki solution, so I hope you don't mind
> me butting in :)
>
> The draft suggests displaying editors' copyright information at the bottom
> of each page, with a specific layout. That has a couple of issues...
>
> The first issue might be obvious, but is worth saying out loud -
> in MediaWiki, it should be a template. For example:
>
> {{{Copyright|Alice, Bob, Carol|license=<optional with sane default>}}}
These guidelines were initially drafted for the MoinMoin wiki, but with
MediaWiki, hopefully everything will be under a consistent license and
this won't be needed anymore.
> Everyone will have opinions about the look of such a block - that it should be
> red like the Debian logo, should be `float: right`, should be zebra-striped,
> and so on. Centralising that logic in a template means every instance looks
> the same, and changes can be implemented site-wide by editing a single page.
>
> The second issue is more subtle - it entrenches editors' bad habit of creating
> new pages to avoid treading on other peoples' toes. The wiki is already full
> of duplicate content, often giving multiple answers that are inconsistent with
> each other and all wrong in different ways. Adding a block to the bottom of
> any page I've touched saying "Copyright Andrew Sayers" would just give people
> another excuse not to review my work.
I agree with that, so maybe only a license field and not copyright, with
the default just being CC BY-SA 4.0 for new content? For instance, I
recently merged some pages into DebianDeveloper/Setup, and put "Wiki
contributors" instead of my own name so it doesn't seem like I own the
thing.
> I've read the "Content licensing" thread, but my only strong opinion is that
> a new wiki should have a single license for all contributions. Among other
> things, that would mean we don't need per-page attribution blocks at all.
That's what I hope will happen.
--
Maytham
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