Cleaning up Copyright, Disclaimer, etc.

[Arnulf Christl (CCGIS)]

Hi,
we have some undefined issues on the OSGeo Wiki that we might want to fix.
I never thought that the Wiki would last as long in this configuration but
now it looks like we might stick with it for some more time so we might as
well spend a thought or two on some basic things.

Currently all content of the Wiki is by default protected by the GNU FDL
license, at least there is a link at the bottom of each page:
http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html

This might not be in the interest of all contributors. I don't think that
this is a pressing issue but we could start a discussion on Discuss to
find out. Comments?

Every Mediawiki installation by default contains an empty Copyright page.
It is displayed in a short text beside the save button whenever a page is
opened for editing. The OSGeo Wiki Copyright page is still empty:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php?title=OSGEO:Copyrights&action=edit

We have recently added some Copyright snippets to the Mapbender Wiki which
was also still empty. While doing it we noticed that we didn't really know
how to. Maybe you want to have a look at what came out of it:
http://www.mapbender.org/index.php/MapbenderWiki:Copyrights

There is another default system for the Disclaimer. When I set up the Wiki
I added a short text (we need this in German legislation) but that was
never discussed or approved by the board:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/OSGEO:General_disclaimer
Find a copy of this text on the About page, this one is also linked from
main page:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/OSGEO:About

Rich, maybe you could comment?

In case you forgot, pages can be protected from editing, I did this for
the board of directors page to prevent every Jack to add himself:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Interim_Board_of_Directors

Whenever the new board members have been sorted out this page protect
needs to be removed. Oh, I just got the results an did it already. Btw.
congrats & welcome, I think we have some cool new board members here!
And while I was at it I moved it from
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Interim_Board_of_Directors
to
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Board_of_Directors

I'd suggest that for the above Copyright and Disclaimer pages we might
also want to add protection. Yes, its me again suggesting to close things.
Just a tiny little bit to show that we are organized. It would look stupid
if we had viagra ads on our Disclaimer page, even if it is only for an
hour.
:-)

To get an idea of what happens around the village pump it might be
interesting to have a look at page stats, page hits are starting to grow
now:
http://wiki.osgeo.org/index.php/Special:Popularpages
You also find this link in the <Special Pages> list which is linked from
the left frame of the Wiki.

Mind me this is not a reliable statistics and fairly easily manipulated
but it shows what people look at.

Best,

-- 
Arnulf Christl
http://www.ccgis.de