Joined reference/credit section on KB articles
David Tenser
support.mozilla.com (SUMO) knowledge base articles was very important to
improve the relationship between SUMO and mZ. In my opinion, the mZ
community was entitled to be a little upset that it took so long for us
to add some credit for their work, and I'm glad we've finally done it.
Moving forward, we need to figure out a working long-term solution that
takes into account sources of information besides just mZ. I want to
discuss this so we can implement it sooner rather than later.
What I would like to see is a visually separated "section" (technically,
a styled <div>) that combines author credit (contributors to the wiki
page itself), other sources/references, date of last modification, and
probably the license. E.g., something like this:
------------------------------------------------
References (or Sources of information?)
* Flash (mozillaZine KB)
* Someone's blog post (John Doe)
Contributors to this page: Alice, Bo, Ehsan
Last modified 2008-01-18 3 PM PST
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons
Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 License.
------------------------------------------------
This section should be under the polls, simply because the polls are
user-oriented features that aim to help the user finding the right
information. For example, if the user selects "No" on the question "Did
this article solve a problem you had with Firefox?", a short list of
alternative actions should be presented.
Placing this among the rest of the "meta data" of the article means a
new technical requirement (just having a standard references section in
the article would require less development time, for example). However,
I think this would be a good time investment for the following reasons:
* The information about license/references/contributors really belong
together.
* It would actually make the info easier to find than mixing parts of it
with the main article content.
* The user-oriented features need to be prominently visible so a user
doesn't miss them.
Thoughts? The aim is to come up with a solution that is fair,
reasonable, and makes sense to most people.
Alice Wyman
> The short-term solution to credit mozillaZine for about 70
> support.mozilla.com (SUMO) knowledge base articles was very important to
> improve the relationship between SUMO and mZ. In my opinion, the mZ
> community was entitled to be a little upset that it took so long for us
> to add some credit for their work, and I'm glad we've finally done it.
I wasn't planning on joining this discussion. I just wanted to add a
link to the related MozillaZine forum thread, for the background:
David Tenser
Thanks Alice!
David Tenser
the current wording that we just have to solve regardless of the
long-term solution (which is more about where to place the info on the
page and how to make that possible).
While there's no current evidence that the content on the mZ KB is
licensed under GFDL, that has been the case in the past. To avoid the
risk of legal issues, we need to change the term "derived from" in our
references to mZ articles, because it is not compatible with GFDL and
our CC license.
I can think of a number of terms that are better:
A. Based on information from:
B. Inspired by:
C. Source(s) of information:
Which one is optimal?
Majken Connor
wrote:
> _______________________________________________
>
IMO "inspired by" is still bad because it doesn't do anything to make it
clear what exactly we took from MZ. Legally we can take *information* from
their articles and write our own, but we can't *base* our articles off of
theirs. That's to say we can't take paragraphs to copy/paste, and we can't
just copy the exact layout with the exact same headings (sometimes there
might be a case where that's just how anyone would write the article, but
for the most part we'll probably differ at least slightly). IMO inspired by
definitely implies that we started with their *article* and not their
*information.*
Mike Connor
- Mike
_______________________________________________
support-planning mailing list
support-...@lists.mozilla.org
https://lists.mozilla.org/listinfo/support-planning
David Tenser
So what you're saying is that you vote for A?
Majken Connor
wrote:
> _______________________________________________
>
Well what I was saying was that I don't think B should be an option ;) ,
however yes, my vote does go to A
Chris Ilias
Depends on the article. B applies in (I think) every case; while A only
applies to some cases. That's why "originally" is in there.
Majken Connor
> _______________________________________________
>
>
What cases are we talking about having this text where A doesn't apply?
David Tenser
A1. Based on information from:
A2. Originally based on information from:
David Tenser
(Proposing two variations of A, in the hope that A is the general
preference among the majority of people who care to vote in this thread)
David Tenser
Any other input or can we settle on A1?
Majken Connor
wrote:
> David Tenser wrote:
> _______________________________________________
>
Chris does have a point. Though unless we rewrite the article entirely we
can't say for sure that it's not still "based" on the old info. If someone
does rewrite the article with entirely new info we could drop the credit.
Otherwise if we added Originally that leaves us room for the article to have
completely different info without the credit being inaccurate.
David Tenser
So, Lucy and Chris votes for A2.
I'm indifferent.
No one else seems to care, or know that this thread is still active.
Does anyone think we should try to get the mZ contributors in here to
have their say? When I started this thread, I posted about it in the mZ
forums, but no one commented so I'm in favor of just going with A2 and
make the change to clear the supposed legal issues.
David Tenser
Hm.. upon reading your post again, I think you meant to say Chris has a
point but you still think A1 is best. Correct?
To me, the most important thing is to clear any legal issues, and
secondary to avoid stirring up any bad blood among the mZ community or
stepping on any individual contributor's toes.
That's why I'm indifferent regarding A1 vs A2. Fwiw, if we do a complete
rewrite of an article, we would probably remove the credit altogether,
so the wording here is not super important.
Jason Barnabe (np)
> To me, the most important thing is to clear any legal issues, and
> secondary to avoid stirring up any bad blood among the mZ community or
> stepping on any individual contributor's toes.
Don't rely on mozillaZine people reading this newsgroup. If you want
their opinion, ask there.
Chris Ilias
> Hm.. upon reading your post again, I think you meant to say Chris has a
> point but you still think A1 is best. Correct?
>
> To me, the most important thing is to clear any legal issues, and
> secondary to avoid stirring up any bad blood among the mZ community or
> stepping on any individual contributor's toes.
>
> That's why I'm indifferent regarding A1 vs A2. Fwiw, if we do a complete
> rewrite of an article, we would probably remove the credit altogether,
> so the wording here is not super important.
A2
Daft Wullie
wrote:
Yes is there any reason this has Not been taken back to MZ? Or are you
trying to avoid that for some obscure reason
Majken Connor
> _______________________________________________
>
There was already a discussion on giving credit to MZ where credit is due,
and on which articles that should be included.
The two main issues were:
1) still recognizing MZs continuous contributions of information to the
Firefox community
2) cases where our articles were actually based of of MZs articles and not
just their facts
We've since realized that case 2 is actually against the terms of our
license and the license that used to be on MZ articles (and still is
legally?) What we're doing right now is choosing wording that satisfies our
license and still gives credit to MZ. There isn't too much wiggle room in
what we can give credit for, so there isn't much point in asking the opinion
of people from MZ in determining the wording.
However, next we need to decide if we want to rewrite from scratch any
articles that seem too close to a MZ article, or if we'll let them evolve
away naturally. That would be the discussion we should definitely have with
the authors from MZ.
Jason Barnabe (np)
> The two main issues were:
> 1) still recognizing MZs continuous contributions of information to the
> Firefox community
> 2) cases where our articles were actually based of of MZs articles and not
> just their facts
>
> We've since realized that case 2 is actually against the terms of our
> license and the license that used to be on MZ articles (and still is
> legally?)
> However, next we need to decide if we want to rewrite from scratch any
> articles that seem too close to a MZ article, or if we'll let them evolve
> away naturally. That would be the discussion we should definitely have with
> the authors from MZ.
The problem is not the content of the articles. All sumo articles
"based on" KB articles were either rewrites to begin with or were
written by the same author.
The problem is with the wording of the credit. Legally, "derived from"
means something other than what really happened here.
David Tenser
I publicly announced that we're discussing this here, but no one from MZ
wanted to join the discussion except Alice. I can do it again, but it's
not like people aren't aware of this thread anyway.
David Tenser
Based on feedback here and from the mZ thread, let's go with "Based on
information from". "Originally" seems a little superfluous since "based
on" usually means "inspired by and extended" anyway, meaning we're not
implying we've been copying most of the content over anyway. Also,
"information" could be anything from the bulk of the content to just a
single sentence.
If we completely rewrite an article and there is no doubt it's no longer
based on the mZ information, we can simply remove the credit line.