Wiki issues with lacking license

Started by Pangaea, June 29, 2019, 09:47:05 AM

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Pangaea

I have started editing on the wiki, and would like to improve some "How to help" pages and suchlike. Naturally it would be much preferable to lean on the shoulders of giants here, instead of starting from scratch. To borrow and adapt/improve content from other wikis (mainly thinking Wikipedia and Gamepedia), both would need to have the same license. Right now there is no information on the RimWorld wiki about its license. Is this an oversight, or is it meant to be like that?

I've tried to contact an an active moderator and the suggested admin (Zesty), but I've no reply from the latter yet. Tried to contact him here too with a PM. I'm probably just impatient, but I'd like to do this now instead of in 3 weeks or 3 months (when I may have temporarily stopped playing the game and visiting the wiki).

If Zesty, Tynan or anybody else can advise here, that would be fantastic.

I've spent an hour or two now trying to locate a template or page that may contain this, just to have a look (e.g., was last edit in 2013?), but I can't find anything in either of the fitting namespaces. Perhaps this is done on the settings/server-side, with LocalSettings.php or something like that. There are some references in CSS files, but that doesn't really help.

In some of these files there are mentions of Wikia as well, which seems pretty odd for a wiki that I thought was independent from them and Gamepedia (which is the same entity now, unfortunately).


Also, since I'm on a Linux system, do you have any idea if there is a good way to extract game images and suchlike?

In the meantime I can try to fool around with an editcopy of the frontpage. It appears to have had essentially the same look, with some adaptions, since the game was in early alpha. Does the look have to be so plain due to load/cheapness reasons? I noticed it's a little sluggish, which may or may not be related to Semantic MediaWiki (it can be horribly taxing). Some pictures, videos and maybe some re-ordering wouldn't kill it otherwise.

Lastly, a reference to the two most likely licenses:
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

Yadgerol

I am very interested in this matter. But still did not get into something

Pangaea

Quote from: Yadgerol on July 01, 2019, 12:03:24 AM
I am very interested in this matter. But still did not get into something
If you mean this specific issue with the lacking license and its consequences, then I very much agree and hope it can be cleared up soon. It would make it much easier to contribute.

If you mean the wiki more in general, then it would be cool to see both you and others contributing over there :) In my mind, a lot could be done to improve matters, though in fairness when I say that I think more about the backbones, the frontpage, more pages, more understandable templates, that sort of thing. Not the most exciting, perhaps, but I can't help but look at stuff like that.

I've been told Zesty (the admin) will get back to me this week, so I look forward to that.

LWM

Oh wow, I never noticed.  I just assumed it was all the standard wikipedia license, given it's a mediawiki.

I believe Tynan set it up way back in the beginning of time, and if he wanted to impose an official CC license on it, I think that would probably fly, given it was described as a community wiki.  Certainly if it were "all posts after July 4th are CC&c&c"?  I'm looking forward to what Zesty says.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who pays attention to licenses (even if I did miss that detail).

--LWM

Pangaea

In fairness I missed it as well at first, and it was brought up when I asked on Gamepedia whether it was fine to copy and adapt some of their stuff. It's certainly a very pertinent point, and I hope it can be cleared up. I've not been able to do anything since (apart from the odd 'normal' edits).

Pangaea

Update:
The missing license issue has been sorted out. Zesty (the administrator) has added it to the footer on every page, and made a separate page about it. This means it's possible to adapt content from other wikis with similar content for this one, which is great news. I've worked rather a lot on some other wikis, and would like to use some of that stuff on this one, in one way or another. And of course, places like Wikipedia is a fountain of knowledge for all things wiki-related, which can be used if feasible.

There is now a license logo in the footer of every page as well, which is great news.

Yeah, it doesn't sound like much, but it's actually really important and takes care of several bits of the process when adapting content from elsewhere.