Toolhub/Progress reports/2021-09-17

Report on activities in the Toolhub project for the 2 weeks ending 2021-09-17.

CC0 selected for content license

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T288832

After discussion with various community folks and a consultation with the Foundation's Legal department, we will be using the Creative Commons CC0 License as the content license for toolinfo data stored in Toolhub. This is the same license used by the Wikidata project for it's structured data.

We considered more complex licensing because of the description field in a Toolhub record. Nearly all other data fields for a toolinfo record are factual data that it would be difficult to defend a copyright claim for. The description however, especially when copied from a content wiki (like English Wikipedia) where a different content license is in use, could be considered copyrighted material rather than a fair use quotation by some. We discussed extending the toolinfo.json schema to include an optional license and author notation just for the description field to better support this likely use case of copying tool descriptions from a content wiki into the Toolhub catalog. Ultimately we felt that introducing this level of flexibility in content licensing would cause more difficulty for reusers of toolinfo data than is warranted. Instead we will adopt a guideline that description content scraped from wikis and uploaded to Toolhub should be limited to 50 words/250 characters.

Now that the license has been selected, we have a small amount of work in progress to add the license information to the UI. This also needs to be recorded in our decision record to help with any discussions of changing the license terms in the future.

List editing

Tracked in Phabricator:
Task T271491

Srishti has a patch up for review to add support in the UI for editing and deleting existing lists.

Wrap up

With the content license selected, the list of critical remaining tasks before we can do the official launch is fairly short:

Create initial database tables and seed data
Create initial Elasticsearch schema and index
Test crawler process from inside Kubernetes staging cluster to validate HTTP proxy configuration

Beyond these must do tasks, we would also like to work on end user documentation for using Toolhub here on metawiki and to plan our announcement strategy for letting the Wikimedia community know about the project. Bryan expects to work on all of these things in the coming week with a personal goal of having the technical tasks completed by the next weekly report.