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     Post subject:Ferrous Moon wiki license? / Onlink guide or Onlink index?
    PostPosted:Tue Oct 07, 2008 11:20 pm 
     

    Joined:Sun Oct 05, 2008 9:05 pm
    Posts:48
    G'day everyone,

    I've been playing Onlink recently and been loving it, and as such I've had a desire to update some of the information on the Ferrous Moon wiki. I'm very new to the Onlink community, but I do have a background working with Wikipedia and other mediawiki projects, so I'm trying to determine which conventions carry across to the Onlink wiki.

    Firstly, there's no mention of under which license contributions are to be made to the wiki. Presently, the Ferrous_Moon_Copyrights page is linked to from every edit box, but it's completely empty. Are contributors assumed to assign their copyright to Ferrous Moon? Are contributions considered to be under a Creative Commons or similar license? Should contributors expect attribution for their work?

    If this information is explained somewhere, then I can't find it, and would love a pointer. I don't really mind what the license is, but it's good to have it defined.

    I also have a specific question with regards to the Onlink guide. Presently, the guide is just a set of links to other articles; in other words, it's more of an Onlink index rather than an Onlink guide.

    On wikipedia, where a subject is particularly in-depth, we'd usually try to have a short synopsis of each section with a link to more information. A good example would be the article on Australia, where the section on history contains a link to the main article. Do we wish to take this approach with the Onlink guide, or is it strictly intended to remain an index?

    Finally, I've noticed the Onlink guide contains a list of contributor credits, but not every page contains this list. Is the Onlink wiki intended to include full attribution on for each page? (It's worth noting that if this is desired, there are mediawiki extensions to automate it.)

    One of the reasons this is relevant to me is that I recently had my contributions on gateway security moved to the hardware page, but with no indication in either the summary logs or discussion pages that this was originally my work. On most full-attribution wikis, doing this would often be considered a breech of etiquette.

    Many thanks again for a fantastic game, and thanks in advance for helping ease my entry into the Onlink community.

    All the very best,

    PJF

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     Post subject:Re: Ferrous Moon wiki license? / Onlink guide or Onlink index?
    PostPosted:Wed Oct 08, 2008 5:26 am 
    Literally Nine
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    Joined:Sat Apr 02, 2005 3:31 pm
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    Quote:
    I've been playing Onlink recently and been loving it, and as such I've had a desire to update some of the information on the Ferrous Moon wiki. I'm very new to the Onlink community, but I do have a background working with Wikipedia and other mediawiki projects, so I'm trying to determine which conventions carry across to the Onlink wiki.
    Well, our wiki is somewhat haphazard. In the past few days, it's gotten a really nice facelift, but as far as wiki conventions go, we don't really have any established yet. If you have suggestions, we'd be happy to hear them! :)
    Quote:
    Firstly, there's no mention of under which license contributions are to be made to the wiki. Presently, the Ferrous_Moon_Copyrights page is linked to from every edit box, but it's completely empty. Are contributors assumed to assign their copyright to Ferrous Moon? Are contributions considered to be under a Creative Commons or similar license? Should contributors expect attribution for their work?
    I put a short and very condescending licensing page up. I'm not exactly pleased with it, but I'm not the most pleasant person to be writing such licensing text.

    If you have some existing terms you could point us to (again, we're new to wikis), then I could probably adapt those terms for Onlink. Heck, might even just copy them straight over.
    Quote:
    I also have a specific question with regards to the Onlink guide. Presently, the guide is just a set of links to other articles; in other words, it's more of an Onlink index rather than an Onlink guide.
    I personally see it as the Onlink mess. The "guide" is indeed little more than an index, and the page most certainly does not look very wiki-quality to me.
    Quote:
    On wikipedia, where a subject is particularly in-depth, we'd usually try to have a short synopsis of each section with a link to more information. A good example would be the article on Australia, where the section on history contains a link to the main article. Do we wish to take this approach with the Onlink guide, or is it strictly intended to remain an index?

    Finally, I've noticed the Onlink guide contains a list of contributor credits, but not every page contains this list. Is the Onlink wiki intended to include full attribution on for each page? (It's worth noting that if this is desired, there are mediawiki extensions to automate it.)
    Feel free to make it better if you'd like. If there's some uploading that needs to happen to get those extensions in (I haven't looked into it), I'd be happy to get it in there. Miah and I are software developers, which I guess implies that we loathe documentation. And that's basically what the wiki is. So we've sort of uploaded the MediaWiki software, pointed it out to users and said "have at it".
    Quote:
    One of the reasons this is relevant to me is that I recently had my contributions on gateway security moved to the hardware page, but with no indication in either the summary logs or discussion pages that this was originally my work. On most full-attribution wikis, doing this would often be considered a breech of etiquette.
    We don't know any better. Perhaps I should just throw the control of the wiki into someone else's hands (yours, perhaps, if you're up to it) . Miah and I really don't quite have the time to deal with everything involved in editing a wiki, release engineering (and quality assurance), software development, debugging, college, work, etc. And it'd be nice to have a Wiki veteran show us how it's done.
    Quote:
    Many thanks again for a fantastic game, and thanks in advance for helping ease my entry into the Onlink community.
    Thanks for the comments. Hopefully we'll have 0.2.0 done sometime soon to get a bit more interest in the Onlink community.

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     Post subject:Re: Ferrous Moon wiki license? / Onlink guide or Onlink index?
    PostPosted:Wed Oct 08, 2008 9:15 am 
    Literally Nine
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    Joined:Tue Mar 01, 2005 9:00 am
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    Quote:
    ...so I'm trying to determine which conventions carry across to the Onlink wiki.
    We would like to carry over the same conventions as Wikipedia, but I don't have the time or the know-how to enforce it (you might note that the new Onlink page's sidebar is not actually a template so much as it is just HTML code)
    Quote:
    Firstly, there's no mention of under which license contributions are to be made to the wiki.
    You were about 14 hours too early. I had just made the disclaimer section yesterday and had not gotten around to the copyright. It's a generic CC license. It's not in stone, of course, so if you know of a more appropriate license, let me know.
    Quote:
    Should contributors expect attribution for their work?
    Eh. Yes and no. I don't like the fact that everything's thrown into the article.
    Quote:
    I also have a specific question with regards to the Onlink guide. Presently, the guide is just a set of links to other articles; in other words, it's more of an Onlink index rather than an Onlink guide.

    On wikipedia, where a subject is particularly in-depth, we'd usually try to have a short synopsis of each section with a link to more information. A good example would be the article on Australia, where the section on history contains a link to the main article. Do we wish to take this approach with the Onlink guide, or is it strictly intended to remain an index?
    Lord, no. I wouldn't want it an index. At the same time, I don't want to write the needed copy or tell people they're doing it wrong. I try to stay hands-off in regards to the public sections of the wiki (anything without an ICARS declaration or the {{internal}} tag) unless vandalism or minor inaccuracies occur.
    Quote:
    Finally, I've noticed the Onlink guide contains a list of contributor credits, but not every page contains this list. Is the Onlink wiki intended to include full attribution on for each page? (It's worth noting that if this is desired, there are mediawiki extensions to automate it.)
    I'll look into installing that later today. Seems like a rather good idea from where I'm sitting.

    Hope this clears some of that up. Let me know if you have any more questions. Message me your Skype name, if you have one.

    One other thing I would like to discuss if you're knowledgeable on the topic is language. About 30% of players appear to come from France of the Netherlands, and I'm wondering what can be reasonably done to accommodate them.


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     Post subject:Re: Ferrous Moon wiki license? / Onlink guide or Onlink index?
    PostPosted:Wed Oct 08, 2008 9:22 pm 
     

    Joined:Sun Oct 05, 2008 9:05 pm
    Posts:48
    I've got haphazard net access this week, so my apologies for this being a partial reply. I'll be posting on remaining issues in a separate follow-up.

    With regard to licenses, you generally want them to stay out of the way, and make it easy to get your job done. Therefore I like to take a very pragmatic approach to them. I'm also going to optimise for the inclusion of wiki text into Onlink and other products.

    So, let's pretend that someone writes some excellent text you want to include in Onlink. I understand that Onlink is closed source, which is a requirement on the original Uplink source code. A CC-BY-ShareAlike license could potentially prevent the use of wiki text in Onlink, because Onlink itself is not under a CC-ShareAlike or similar license. The license gets in the way. That sucks.

    If you want a CC license, then I'd be inclined to use a CC-BY (Attribution) or CC-BY-NC (Attribution/Non-commercial), with a clarification that linking to the wiki is considered sufficient attribution. This means you can just list "The Onlink wiki" (with a URL) in your credits and be done with it, rather than having to try and list a million billion different contributors.

    One potential gotcha here is that wiki users could infer that your own contributions are available under a CC license. You may be happy with all your protected pages being copied to other sites under CC, but you may not. In that case, your license is getting in the way again. In this case, I like Tycho's license more, although I change the working just a little, perhaps to:
    Quote:
    By posting contributions to this site, you automatically grant, and you represent and warrant that you have the right to grant, to Ferrous Moon an irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide licence (with the right to sublicence) to use, copy, publicly perform, publicly display, reformat, translate, excerpt (in whole or in part) and distribute such contributions for any purpose, to prepare derivative works of, or incorporate into other works, and to grant and authorise sublicences of the foregoing.
    That means others can't copy your work, but you have full rights over theirs. That license stays out of your way as much as it possibly can. The downside is that you may reduce the number of contributions which can be made to the wiki, particularly if people wish to contribute Creative Commons images, or contributors would like to receive attribution for their work. You can also hamper people creating their own guides and handbooks based upon the wiki, and often these can be great for community building.

    Finally, if contributions to Onlink require a particular license, then using that license may be best of all. This is a common thing to see in the Perl world, where modules, wikis, and other projects are generally made "under the same license as Perl itself".

    Some projects take a "contributions are under license X, except on pages marked Y, where contributions are under license Z" approach. That gives you the best of both worlds, although with the downside of increased complexity.

    Please note that I am not a lawyer, and this should not be considered legal advice. If I suggest a license or idea and it's broken, you get to keep both pieces. ;)

    All the best,

    Paul

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     Post subject:Acknowleding contributors
    PostPosted:Thu Oct 09, 2008 1:53 am 
     

    Joined:Sun Oct 05, 2008 9:05 pm
    Posts:48
    Quote:
    If there's some uploading that needs to happen to get those extensions in (I haven't looked into it), I'd be happy to get it in there.
    If you want the contributors extension, then yes, it needs to be installed and the LocalSettings.php file updated. However that's only if you want it to be installed.

    The English Wikipedia policy is that articles are not owned by anyone, and so contributors are not listed on the article page, although they are listed in the history. The main reason for this is to discourage people from feeling they own an article, and are entitled to some sort of special rights with regards to its editing. If you're going to use Wikipedia policies and guidelines, we'd be getting rid of the contributions sections entirely.

    However we do want to encourage contributions, and if people are making wiki edits because it gets their names on articles, then I don't really want to take away that carrot. In that case I think the contributors extension is a small win, since it means if anyone wants an attribution list, then all significant contributors get mentioned (which avoids "why did you mention X and not Y?" fingerpointing).

    I haven't used the contributors extension on any of my own wikis, although glancing over the source it looks sensible enough.
    Quote:
    Perhaps I should just throw the control of the wiki into someone else's hands (yours, perhaps, if you're up to it) .
    I don't want to volunteer as being wiki-meister yet, I actually think I'm way too new to the community for such a position. Having said that, I would love to be able to tweak the navigation sidebar and stylesheets. To do that, I believe I'd need sysop access, or have one of you willing to make changes for me.
    Quote:
    Lord, no. I wouldn't want it an index.
    Oh good. I'll start un-indexing it when I've got the time. Most contributions in the main guide will probably go into templates, so the same text can be included in both the guide and the full articles (otherwise we need to do double-updates on text).
    Quote:
    Hope this clears some of that up. Let me know if you have any more questions. Message me your Skype name, if you have one.
    I'm almost never on skype, but using jabber I can be reached on pjf-at-jabber.org.
    Quote:
    One other thing I would like to discuss if you're knowledgeable on the topic is language. About 30% of players appear to come from France of the Netherlands, and I'm wondering what can be reasonably done to accommodate them.
    In a wiki sense? I'm not knowledgeable enough. However I do know people who are, so I'll see if I can do some research and get back to you.

    All the very best,

    Paul

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     Post subject:Re: Acknowleding contributors
    PostPosted:Thu Oct 09, 2008 10:58 am 
    Literally Nine
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    Quote:
    The English Wikipedia policy is that articles are not owned by anyone, and so contributors are not listed on the article page, although they are listed in the history. The main reason for this is to discourage people from feeling they own an article, and are entitled to some sort of special rights with regards to its editing. If you're going to use Wikipedia policies and guidelines, we'd be getting rid of the contributions sections entirely.
    One of the things I want is to have people tell me if they're using our data. It's not for control, but rather for personal reference, knowing what sort of public attention we're getting, if any.

    Of course, we can't force anyone to tell us, so that makes things a bit complicated. Not even pages marked {{internal}} should be considered "owned" even though they contain official information. Not sure what to do, maybe just use teh Google for such info.

    Also, maybe you can tell me what I need to do to rid of that ugly /index.php/ thing. We got rid of it once before, but it just sort of reappeared one day. The people we had to do it last time seems to have been away the last three days...


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     Post subject:Re: Ferrous Moon wiki license? / Onlink guide or Onlink index?
    PostPosted:Thu Oct 09, 2008 8:29 pm 
     

    Joined:Sun Oct 05, 2008 9:05 pm
    Posts:48
    Miah, I hope to give answers to your questions shortly, but I'm (still) short on network connectivity due to my travels. Apologies for the delay.

    Quick sanity check: If I were to reskin the wiki (using only CSS changes) to use the same colours as the forums (white text, dark blue background, light blue links), would that be considered good or bad?

    I know the wiki contains more information than just Onlink, but I really do like the Onlink style, so I'd love to use it on the wiki as well.

    All the best,

    Paul

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     Post subject:Getting rid of index.php paths
    PostPosted:Thu Oct 09, 2008 9:16 pm 
     

    Joined:Sun Oct 05, 2008 9:05 pm
    Posts:48
    Quote:
    One of the things I want is to have people tell me if they're using our data. It's not for control, but rather for personal reference, knowing what sort of public attention we're getting, if any.

    Of course, we can't force anyone to tell us, so that makes things a bit complicated. Not even pages marked {{internal}} should be considered "owned" even though they contain official information. Not sure what to do, maybe just use teh Google for such info.
    Under a CC-style license, informing the authors that work is being used isn't required, but it is considered polite. Putting a request for notification on the copyrights page (or as a general notice on the wiki) can help that, although people can always ignore it.

    In my experience, using Google or similar technologies to find reproduced work provides the best bang-for-buck in tracking reproduced work (although it's easily stopped with an appropriate robots.txt file).
    Quote:
    Also, maybe you can tell me what I need to do to rid of that ugly /index.php/ thing. We got rid of it once before, but it just sort of reappeared one day. The people we had to do it last time seems to have been away the last three days...
    I wish that getting rid of the index.php paths were easy, but it usually requires significant mod_rewrite magic. Here's what I use (place into the appropriate VirtualHost section in your apache config):
    Quote:
    # Nice re-writes for pretty URLs.
    RewriteEngine on

    # Rewrite /wiki (no trailing slash) to the main page.
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/wiki$
    RewriteRule ^(.*) /wiki/index.php?title=Main_Page [L]

    # Leave those poor mediawiki subdirectories and special
    # files alone.

    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wiki/stylesheets/
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wiki/skins/
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wiki/(redirect|texvc|index).php
    RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} !^/wiki/images/

    # Rewrite /wiki/Article_name. This is where the magic happens.
    RewriteRule ^/wiki/(.*) /wiki/index.php?title=$1 [L,QSA]
    You'll probably also need to update the $wgScript variable in your LocalSettings.php file, so mediawiki generates pretty URLs:
    Quote:

    # $wgScript = "$wgScriptPath/index.php"; # Comment out this line.
    $wgScript = "$wgScriptPath/"; # Add this line.
    This is assuming a fairly standard mediawiki install, and assuming that I haven't missed any special files or directories, and that mediawiki haven't changed things significantly since I last had to do one of these setups. Conditions apply, actual results may vary. Keep out of reach of children. Do not expose to direct sunlight. Slippery when wet.

    All the best,

    Paul

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