Discussion - The Biographicon

License?

Anonymous

April 02, 2008, at 1:23 PM CDT

I checked everywhere, but could not find the licensing agreement. Since the site picked information verbatim from Wikipedia, I am guessing it is GNU GFDL 1.2 or superior, since any other license would be incompatible. I think it should be added in the ToS.

Yours,
Roberto / en:User:ReyBrujo

herdrick

April 02, 2008, at 5:01 PM CDT

Hi Robert0 - The GNU license is shown in the Archive (history) page of every biography that came from Wikipedia. For example: http://www.biographicon.com/history/i599n/Deng_Xiaoping But, it sounds like it was too hard to find given a reasonable effort so we need to do something different. I'll put this same comment on your WP User page.

Thanks!

Anonymous

April 02, 2008, at 11:20 PM CDT

By the way, I suggest putting a "License" link at the bottom between the guidelines and the privacy and terms of service, or inside the terms of service. Or maybe mentioning that in the About page. It doesn't really matter where (the history is fine enough) but the more obvious, the less questions you may get.

By the way, I reached this page through an article at Ars Technica. Hopefully I am not the only one :-)

Cheers!
Roberto / en:User:ReyBrujo

herdrick

April 05, 2008, at 6:01 AM CDT

OK, good idea. Thanks!

And, no we've had a lot of great user come here via ArsTechnica. Really great crowd there.

Anonymous

April 02, 2008, at 11:15 PM CDT

Oh, that is right. I checked most pages, but not the history. Thanks for clarifying, and good luck with this project! And thanks for dropping by there to let me know, was going to check tomorrow but it was much easier to get the notification there.

Cheers!
Roberto / en:User:ReyBrujo

herdrick

April 05, 2008, at 6:00 AM CDT

Thanks, Roberto! Hope to see you around, both here and on Wikipedia.

May 26, 2009, at 11:41 PM CDT

Aha :) So herdrick... how do we help bring this site back to life? It's a beautiful concept and execution, from the visual flow to the generous contextual linking to other lives. More visible Recentchanges and community discussions would help. More cross-wiki visibility on related Wikipedia work likewise.

Regarding the license, Wikipedia is changing to CC-SA, and there are only 2 months in which you can do the same for new contributions here. Depending on how many posts there have been here and how far out of synch the average bio is already, this may not matter too much - perhaps youcould regenerate the site under the new license and point to an archive of the old one for reference... but if you're around and interested in compatibility, it's worth making the change.