Copyright questions and development

[CristianCantoro]

Hi,
I am a Wikipedia user and member of Wikimedia Italia
(www.wikimedia.it), the italian chapter of the Wikimedia foundation. I
like a lot your game and I think it is very challenging. I am also
glad to see that it is released under GNU LGPL.
I have some remarks and questions:
1) the logo. You should know that the Wikipedia logo (the "globe") is
a property of the Wikimedia Foundation, so its use is restricted (as
you can see here for example (1)). As we are speaking about
copyrighted work, derivative works are not allowed. So I suggest you
to modify your logo. I think that a question mark with "puzzle"
texture should be ok! See this (2) for example, or question marks here
(3) and other good ideas(4).
1bis) Wikipedia itself is released under GNU FDL and CC3.0-BY-SA (see
here(5) for details) so I think it is better if you link in your
answers the revision number of the article and/or its history to
comply the license, I don't think this should be too hard to
implement.
Please note that I am not writing on the behalf of the Wikimedia
Foundation nor Wikimedia Italia, but as a simple Wikipedia user,
moreover I don't know if you may have any previous contact with WMF
for the use of the logo. I want to stress these are only tips for you.
2) Is it possible to translate it in other languages? i.e. extracting
content from other languages Wikipedias?
3) Could you add a link to *edit* the article? I was thinking about:
something that could sound like "Did you find a typo? Edit the article
on Wikipedia".
4) May you be interested in creating a Facebook application/game from
this? I am not such a huge fan of Facebook but I know some people
spend time on it playing flash games. I think this will be good for
spreading your game and, consequently, the number of people that use/
read (and maybe will edit) Wikipedia.

If you have any question or if you want to ask some more expert
wikipedians or the community a good place to start is the Village Pump
(6). Please, let me know in my user talk(7) if you start a discussion
on it.

Thanks a lot for your game.

Cristian

(1)http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wikipedia_original_logo.jpg
(2)http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wiki_puzzle.svg
(3)http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Question_marks
(4)http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/
Category:Question_marks_on_book_icons
(5)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:License#Reusers.
27_rights_and_obligations
(6)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump
(7)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:CristianCantoro

[CristianCantoro]

Hi,
I've tried to install the softaware and I made it work (it is very
easy). Though, questions aren't loaded into the DB I think... in fact
I obtain the page saying the question can be loaded and if I look into
the DB it is empty.
Can you help me?

Thanks in advance.

Cristian

[Alex K]

Hi Cristian,

Thank you for the feedback and sorry for getting back to you so late.

> 1) the logo. You should know that the Wikipedia logo (the "globe") is
> a property of the Wikimedia Foundation, so its use is restricted (as
> you can see here for example (1)). As we are speaking about
> copyrighted work, derivative works are not allowed. So I suggest you
> to modify your logo. I think that a question mark with "puzzle"
> texture should be ok! See this (2) for example, or question marks here
> (3) and other good ideas(4).

Thanks for the logo suggestions. I'll see what I can do.

> 1bis) Wikipedia itself is released under GNU FDL and CC3.0-BY-SA (see
> here(5) for details) so I think it is better if you link in your
> answers the revision number of the article and/or its history to
> comply the license, I don't think this should be too hard to
> implement.

After you have answered the question, there is an actual link to the
Wikipedia article. I guess I could put a "cheat" link under the
question itself.

> Please note that I am not writing on the behalf of the Wikimedia
> Foundation nor Wikimedia Italia, but as a simple Wikipedia user,
> moreover I don't know if you may have any previous contact with WMF
> for the use of the logo. I want to stress these are only tips for you.

> 2) Is it possible to translate it in other languages? i.e. extracting
> content from other languages Wikipedias?

Yes it's very easy and I could use some help in Italian for example ;)
You simply need to translate the categories on this file:
http://github.com/alexksikes/wikitrivia/blob/master/app/models/categories.py
I will take care of the rest.

> 3) Could you add a link to *edit* the article? I was thinking about:
> something that could sound like "Did you find a typo? Edit the article
> on Wikipedia".

Sounds like a good idea but could divert the user from the actual
game.

> 4) May you be interested in creating a Facebook application/game from
> this? I am not such a huge fan of Facebook but I know some people
> spend time on it playing flash games. I think this will be good for
> spreading your game and, consequently, the number of people that use/
> read (and maybe will edit) Wikipedia.

Thanks for the suggestion.

> If you have any question or if you want to ask some more expert
> wikipedians or the community a good place to start is the Village Pump
> (6). Please, let me know in my user talk(7) if you start a discussion
> on it.

Thanks for the pointer.

Alex

[Alex K]

Hi Cristian,

The questions are being fetched live from Wikipedia. The DB is used
solely for caching in case fetching has failed.

Alex