Thursday, December 24, 2009

Understanding the Commons licenses


When you upload images to Commons, a lot of information needs to be provided before those images are completely secure. Essential to Commons is the choice of one of the permissible licenses, essential because Commons aims to be a resource exclusively of freely licensed media files.

As many people do not speak English, you will find that they do not participate on Commons. That is a shame because they typically represent countries and cultures that are not well covered in both our Wikipedias and Commons.

Translating those license texts is one of the obvious aids in helping out. This is already done on Commons, using the Commons community. I am really happy to learn that moves are under way to bring such texts to translatwiki.net and leverage that great community of translators.

Licenses are not only relevant to Commons, there are many more situations where these texts are relevant. Growing the number of freely licensed applications that are supported at translatewiki.net will make sure that more of those commonalities will be found and, this means that these texts can be re-used.

Growing the number of applications and growing the community of translators at translatewiki.net makes it possible to share localisations, makes it possible to support your language and you applications with one effective interface.
Thanks,
      GerardM

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