Topic on Project:Village Pump/Flow

I noticed the help pages are licensed CC0. But when editing a help page, the user is only informed about this through the edit notice. That's a rather unusual place, but even accepting that, the edit notice is not visible when using mobile view. How could we improve this?

• Make edit notices visible in mobile view?
• License all new text contributions to this wiki under CC0? (unless there are any good arguments against I'd support this)
• Use the edit filter to block(/warn?) contributions to help pages from mobile editors?

There is a reason why Wikimedia projects are usually not put under CC0 – it is not a license promoting free knowledge by spreading it (sa) and promoting its origin (by). I see no real reason to change that.

Editnotices should be available in mobile view anyway.

But they're not. Well a fourth solution is to change the license for help pages to CC BY-SA, but I assume there's a reason they are CC0. Or a fifth solution is to create a separate wiki for help pages, but that's too much work. I am not super familiar with this wiki, but besides the help pages, what content is here that someone might create a derivative work of?

Bugs should not be a reason to change policy.

I assume there's a reason they are CC0

My understanding has always been that this is to allow these pages to be copied to other wikis without requiring backlinks, copying the complete history, a list of authors, or any other method of content license compliance. I also recall seeing something about eventually having a corpus of help pages that could be included in the default installation, but I doubt I'd be able to find any mention of that now.

Exactly this. It's so the help pages can be redistributed and copied into any wiki, regardless of what that wiki's license is. My HelpPages extension takes advantage of that.

See Project:PD help

Jdforrester, @MGChecker, this (probably) isn't a bug in MediaWiki, it's a missing feature. (on the other hand, if Jdforrester calls it a bug, I guess maybe it is? I'm gonna declare the phab task a bug!!) phab:T201595 has been open since 2018 so we can't assume this will be fixed, like, ever. If a license change is also unacceptable, that realistically only leaves the edit filter to block contributions from mobile editors to the Help: namespace. I'm fine either way really (though some solutions would be better than others), as long as this doesn't get swept under the rug.

Edit: I had changed the subtype for phab:T201595 to "bug". Jdforrester is a developer, if he says it's a bug I probably shouldn't argue with that, and I was kind of thrilled to see a developer make a statement about a w:WP:THEYCANTHEARYOU issue. But confusingly Jdforrester changed it back. So according to Jdforrester this issue is Schrödinger's cat. Just kidding of course, I actually have no idea now.

Most help pages have Template:PD Help Page on them which makes the licensing situation abundantly clear. I think that should be good enough until mobile is fixed (whenever it is).

At least Help:Extension:ParserFunctions (probably the one I look up the most) doesn't.

Fixed.

One could even make a small bot run to find out all pages within Help namespace that are currently missing this template.

@MGChecker @Legoktm you mean  ? I listed pages that are not subpages on User:Alexis Reggae/PDhelp.

Edit: Flow is worthless. This was a reply to Legoktm.

I reopened the topic since there are remaining questions to discuss, which do not seem helpful to spread elsewhere.

Since the template is not present on all Help pages, we should them add to the missing ones, probably per bot. I would deem the contributions by mobile editors unaware of the licensing intention sufficiently small in most cases that this should not pose any significant problems.

I reopened the topic since there are remaining questions to discuss, which do not seem helpful to spread elsewhere.

No problem! But can you explain what questions you think are open, because I can't see them? Sorry!

Can we just implement something like https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Wikidata-copyright ?

While it's a good idea and I support doing it in addition to other solution(s), the footer is easy to overlook and mostly targeted towards re-users, not contributors. w:User:Alexis Jazz/EditNoticesOnMobile is also a possibility, I could make a version that's limited to the Help: namespace if needed. Or if a bot adds Template:PD Help Page on every applicable page, while not my first choice due to banner blindness, I suppose that could be sufficient as well. It may actually be possible to solve this problem the proper way, I found this in editpage.php: // Allow for site and per-namespace customization of contribution/copyright notice. But I have no idea how this could be accomplished. But according to the code comment it's possible. Anyone?

Edit: I created phab:T301483.