[Licom-l] Fwd: Updating site terms

Wed May 27 11:01:10 UTC 2009

I forward the questions you asked to Siebrand (from
translatewiki.net/mediawiki-i18n guru), and he has given some helpful
tips.

--Casey

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Siebrand Mazeland <s.mazeland at xs4all.nl>
Date: Wed, May 27, 2009 at 5:27 AM
Subject: RE: [Licom-l] Updating site terms
To: Casey Brown <cbrown1023.ml at gmail.com>

Hi Casey,

* do new system messages automatically override any local translations? No.
The only way to make this happen is to remove the local page in the
MediaWiki: namespace.
* the current copyright notice displayed on every page in MediaWiki is
stored in [[MediaWiki:Copyright]]. The default value is "'Content is
available under $1.'", where $1 is a link to wiki page $wgRightsPage with
link description $wgRightsText. Other messages that often contain customised
text referring to a license are copyrightwarning, copyrightwarning2,
edittools, licenses, uploadtext
* the page that describes license/copyright is set in the wiki configuration
file, and can be manged centrally through $wgRightsPage

I think that given the large number of places where licenses may have been
mentioned (either in system messages, but also in Project: namespace pages),
it is almost impossible to 'just change a few things in the back-end'
(either config or message names or message content) and be done with it.
Each community has to inspect its own wiki and make appropriate changes. The
WMF should of course make the appropriate changes in the back-end to config
settings, which may work quite well for 60-80% of the 750 wikis that do not
have customised license messages.

That does however not mean that we cannot facilitatie some things centrally.
Some of my thoughts on that:

* report on locally customised messages with the usage of the words "GNU"
and "GFDL" it them, and if the above mentioned messages have been
customised, because they almost certainly need to be updated
* create a central place for translating 'the new Wikimedia project license
text'. Translatewiki.net could facilitate this with the page translation
feature. A bot operator could sync things back to Meta, or whereever it
would be needed.

Makes sense? Comments/questions?

Siebrand

-----Oorspronkelijk bericht-----
Van: Casey Brown [mailto:cbrown1023.ml at gmail.com]
Verzonden: dinsdag 26 mei 2009 22:51
Aan: s.mazeland at xs4all.nl
Onderwerp: Fwd: [Licom-l] Updating site terms

you might have good suggestions for this.

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org>
Date: Tue, May 26, 2009 at 1:46 PM
Subject: [Licom-l] Updating site terms
To: Wikimedia licensing update committee <licom-l at lists.wikimedia.org>

[snip]