Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge/Guidelines/Enforcing the license

A guiding path that makes the collaboration among cultural institutions and Wikipedia easier. It has been created for WikiAfrica and gives its contribution to the GLAM project.

Hints on how cultural institutions can give their contribute to Wikipedia.

This answers list about contents use has been written down on the basis of the FAQs made by Share Your Knowledge project involved institutions.

Note: Before following these instructions you have to check out the chance to spread your own contents through Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike license (CC BY-SA): see the FAQs on licenses and copyright.

How can I put my documentation under Creative Commons license?

You have to add the license in the institution documentation so that the user can read it and search engines or automatic contents management systems acknowledge it.

You will find below the practical procedures to add CC BY-SA license on your online documents. In case you cannot do that (for example since the contents are not available online), you can provide a written authorization before using the contents on Wikipedia: see Wikipedia:Donating copyrighted materials.

Case A. Adding the license on a website

1. How can I indicate a Creative Commons license on a website?

In order to make your own website acknowledge the license, you have to add a peculiar code in the footer (the lowest part) in each page of your website.

Open the page

http://creativecommons.org/choose/

and answer two simple questions about which license you prefer.

If you press “Choose the license” you can choose the size of the icon you want to put on your website.

Now you can copy the automatically generated code. This code contains both the text for the user (HTML) and the instructions for the search engines (RDF).

You will find next two examples of CC BY-SA license with the sentence “Apart from where it is differently specified” and the link to a page with the description of which contents are under license.

1.1. Sample code for full sharing

<html>
<head>
...
</head>
<body>
...
<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">
<img alt="License Creative Commons" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/3.0/88x31.png" />
</a><br />Except for <a href="descriptive page address">differently specified
</a>, the contents of this website are published under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">
Creative Commons Attribution - ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license</a>.
...
</body>
</html>

1.2. Sample code for text-only sharing

<html>
<head>
...
</head>
<body>
...
<a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">
<img alt="License Creative Commons" style="border-width:0" src="http://i.creativecommons.org/l/by-sa/3.0/88x31.png" />
</a><br />Except for <a href="descriptive page address">differently specified
</a>, the texts of this website are distributed under a <a rel="license" href="http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/">
Creative Commons Attribution – ShareAlike 3.0 Unported license</a>.
...
</body>
</html>

2. How can I add the Creative Commons license code on a website?

You can add the license in various ways according to the system used for the website creation:

a) the website is managed by a webmaster:

you just have to tell your webmaster which code has to be inserted in the footer.

b) the website is managed by a CMS (content management system):

if the management is automatized through Wordpress or Drupal, you can use specific open source plug-ins that can be freely downloaded from http://openattribute.com/

As far as other CMS systems this can be more complex and require the editing of the used template by an expert.

3. How can I check out that the search engines acknowledge the added license?

When the code has been inserted and the license is visible on the website, you should check out that the search engines acknowledge it correctly.

In order to check if the Creative Commons license metadata have been correctly added you have to use a browser among Firefox, Chrome, and Opera, installing a free add-on distributed by OpenAttribute.com.

Once you have installed the add-on, you just have to visit your own website page and check the presence of a little icon at the end of the address bar.

Addon for Firefox: https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/openattribute/

Informazioni dettagliate: http://openattribute.com/first-run-firefox/

For Chrome you have to use the link on the page http://openattribute.com/

Detailed information: http://openattribute.com/first-run-chrome/

Addon for Opera: https://addons.opera.com/addons/extensions/details/open-attribute/

Detailed information: http://openattribute.com/first-run-opera/

4. How can I indicate a specific license or the copyright existence for a specific content?

For texts, images and videos you can specify:

a) the existence of a specific license using the code written on it and adding: “This page text is distributed …”;

Case B. Adding the license on a PDF document

1. How can I indicate the chosen CC license in a document to be spread as a PDF?

In order to have a license acknowledged for your document, you can add an image and a peculiar text to the colophon or to the last document page.

Moreover the PDF file must contain the metadata allowing the license acknowledgement by search engines and other automatic systems.

2. Which text and image can I add to the PDF document?

Open the page:

http://creativecommons.org/choose/

and answer two simple questions about the license you prefer.

Press “Choose the license”.

In the right page column there is the title “Offline artwork (not available on the web?)” Press the link in the line “To mark a document not on the web, add this text to your work.” and copy the given text (it starts with “This work is licensed …”) in your own document.

Together with the text, add the image related to the license, which you can download from the page

http://creativecommons.org/about/downloads/

and choose the icon and format to be used in your PDF document.

You can download the image in SVG, EPS, and PNG formats. The PNG format is the simplest one.

3. How can I add the metadata to the PDF document?

Meta-data are included in the PDF file encoding and they are not immediately visible by the user.

To add them you can use two different free open source programs.

3.1. PDFLicenseManager

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/PdfLicenseManager

This open source multiplatform program is used to add the XMP meta-data of a Creative Commons license in an already given PDF file. The visible content is not modified.

It requires the installation of Java on your computer (http://www.java.com/it/download/manual.jsp).

Apple provides its own Java version: use “Software Update” on the Apple menu to check out that the Java version on your Mac is up to date.

3.2. CC PDF Converter

http://www.cogniview.com/cc-pdf-converter.php

Open source program for Windows used to create PDF files with a Creative Commons license. The PDF document will be created through the virtual printer installed within the software, the full license text is added at the end of the document.

4. How can I check out that the license has been correctly added on a PDF file?

In order to check out the that the license has been correctly added, you can use PDFLicenseManager program:

http://wiki.creativecommons.org/PdfLicenseManager

When you open up the PDF file in the program the license data included in the file will show up.

It requires the installation of Java on your computer (http://www.java.com/it/download/manual.jsp).

Apple provides its own Java version: use “Software Update” on the Apple menu to check out that the Java version on your Mac is up to date.

Related pages

Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge/Guidelines/Wikipedia - FAQs about how to upload contents on Wikipedia
Wikipedia:WikiAfrica/Share Your Knowledge/Guidelines/License - FAQs about license and copyright