There is one other potential change I would like to talk to users of
the wiki about. With the current version of MoinMoin, it is possible
to display something like the following text when a user is editing a
page:
By hitting Save Changes you put your changes under the
GnuFreeDocumentationLicense. If you don't want that, hit Cancel to
cancel your changes.
If you click on "GnuFreeDocumentationLicense", it should take you to
the text for the license, which can also be read here:
http://www.gnu.org/licenses/fdl.txt
I have already implemented this on my new Glass Bead Game Wiki, so
feel free to play around in the sandbox there to see this feature in
action. Please don't add any pages that are not related to the subject
of the Glass Bead Game Wiki, of course!
http://www.ludism.org/gbgwiki/WikiSandBox
The terms on the licensing page of the GBG Wiki read,
All data on this wiki entered on or after 01 January 2004 is
copyrighted by its author in the year it was entered, and permission
is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify it under the terms of
the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.2 or any later version
published by the Free Software Foundation; with no Invariant
Sections, no Front-Cover Texts, and no Back-Cover Texts. A copy of
version 1.2 of this license is included below.
In other words, users "own" the copyright to their own text and
images, but they make it freely available to the community. This is a
standard "free" license that is used widely, not least for most
piecepack games. I would like to add this feature to the Piecepack
Wiki, but I don't want to do so until there has been a discussion of
the issue. I will give users on this list until 1 February 2004 to
ask questions, give opinions, and raise objections. If there are no
serious objections by 1 February, I will implement this feature on the
wiki. I hope there are no serious objections; in my opinion, it is
important to have a license like this for the data on the wiki because
of the freedom-of-information ethic that prevails in the piecepack
community, not to mention the wider community of wiki users.