Skylark1

This article is the subject of a request emailed to the Wikimedia foundation: Issues identified are: This user has permission to release any speeches, letters and press releases relating to the peace process by Rajiva Wijesinha, Secretary General of the Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process under the CC-BY-SA license. The OTRS ticket number is 2007112710005321

Hello, Skylark1, welcome to Wikisource! Thanks for your interest in the project; we hope you'll enjoy the community and your work here. If you need help, see our help pages (especially Adding texts and Wikisource's style guide). You can discuss or ask questions from the community in general at the Scriptorium. The Community Portal lists tasks you can help with if you wish. If you have any questions, feel free to contact me on my talk page.

Thanks for setting up Author:Rajiva Wijesinha. In order for these documents to remain on Wikisource, we will need to identify the legal basis for each work being in public domain. Could you read through "Wikisource:Copyright policy" and "Help:Copyright tags".

In the same vein, the image Image:Rajiva.jpeg must comply with our copyright policy. Did you take this photograph yourself, or is it an image found on the internet ?

John Vandenberg 23:51, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

I see that on w:Image:Rajiva2007.jpg you have tagged the image as "PD-self" ; if you are the copyright holder of the image, that is great news. John Vandenberg 23:54, 4 October 2007 (UTC)

Hi again, I have put a notice on Letter from SCOPP Secretary General Rajiva Wijesinha to the International Herald Tribune 20 - 08 - 2007 and Image:Rajiva.jpeg to indicate it doesnt have a "license" tag. Unless you can give us a legal basis for retaining this, we will have no option but to delete it. If it is more suitable to discuss this via email, click here. John Vandenberg 14:17, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

If you took the photo, please tag it with {{GFDL}}, {{CC-BY-SA-2.0}} or {{PD-self}}.

The notice at the bottom of the Secretariat for Coordinating the Peace Process (SCOPP) website ( "public information and may be distributed or copied" ) is not sufficient to meet our inclusion policy, because it does not explicitly place it into the public domain, nor does not explicitly explain what rights are being given away. For example, are we allowed to translate the document into French? Wikisource only accepts works where it is very clear that there are no restrictions placed on its use.

In order to keep hosting these speeches and letters, we need each copyright holder (i.e. Rajiva Wijesinha) to license theses works under one of the licenses we accept ({{GFDL}}, {{CC-BY-SA-2.0}} or {{PD-release}}). If you need time to arrange this, that is fine! We can wait as we know there is intent to rectify the situation; nothing will be deleted irrationally. John Vandenberg 15:28, 9 November 2007 (UTC)

It is not worth trying to change the website, as that can change later.

The best approach is to forward to "permissions@wikimedia.org" the proof that the author is happy for you to upload these documents under one of those licenses. As an example, he could email you to grant you permission to release "all speeches, letters and press releases under the GFDL", and you could then forward that to permissions@wikimedia.org. It would be even better if the author sent you a signed letter to the same effect, and you then scanned the letter and sent the image to that email address. They may respond requiring further clarification. Let me know if you encounter problems along the way. John Vandenberg 12:07, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

If you are confident that the permission paperwork will be sorted out soon, I think it is safe to continue. John Vandenberg 21:34, 12 November 2007 (UTC)

On licenses

CC-BY-SA and GFDL are very similar, but differ in the degree of record keeping required, and by extension also in enforceability. Both of these licenses are called "copyleft" because if a copyleft work is incorporated into a larger work, the larger work also becomes free. This limits the likelihood that it can be abused.

• The GFDL requires that any person who modifies the work must also provide "online" copies of the previous versions, and publish the address of these previous versions. This ensures that the reader can see the differences introduced in any modified version. For Wikipedia and Wikisource, this requirement maps to our history tab at the top of every page. Every revision must be available. Because GFDL has many strict fidelity/provenance requirements, only people who are meticulous will be in compliance.
• CC-BY-SA requires that anyone who publishes a modification must also provide a URL that the author requests. For example, in this case, it would be the Wikisource page URL that would need to be provided with any modification. This is not as onerous as the GFDL, but almost as effective.

I have just checked, and we also do permit "CC-BY" (i.e. not SA), which is not "copyleft". This allows the texts to be more easily reused and redistributed as part of commercial works. It still requires attribution, and that a URL of the authors choosing is published with it.

In order to achieve the widest reuse, I suggest going with CC-BY-SA for the moment. It has less hurdles, and the originals will always be kept on Wikisource where fidelity wont be compromised, so people will always be able to spot flaws in malicious reproductions. John Vandenberg 12:36, 26 November 2007 (UTC)

Good to see it's all been sorted. John Vandenberg 09:55, 26 December 2007 (UTC)

email notifications

Hi, after a proposal to enable email notification, Wikisource is now able to notify you of any changes to pages on your watchlist and/or changes to your talk page. In order to take advantage of these features, you need to enabled them in your preferences. --John Vandenberg ^(chat) 14:31, 18 April 2008 (UTC)

Copyright

Hi Skylark. Don't worry, all I'm saying with the template is to add a license tag to the work on the bottom of the page. Choose which license applies from here: Help:Copyright tags and place it at the end of the page. See this work for an example: False though She be. Once you include it you can remove the template I put at the top. If you have any questions, feel free to ask me. Thanks and happy editing! - Mtmelendez 12:23, 21 July 2008 (UTC)

Author:Rajiva Wijesinha

I'd just like to confirm that these texts are indeed public-domain licensed. As far as I can tell from the permissions ticket (I am a part of the Wikimedia OTRS response team), the release was the copyleft CreativeCommons Attribution ShareAlike license, but the license template used on Author:Rajiva Wijesinha states that these texts are in the public domain, which is not a copyleft license.

If CC-BY-SA is the correct license, {{PD-author-release}} needs to be replaced with {{CC-BY-SA-3.0}}. Jude (talk) 09:22, 13 April 2009 (UTC)