MYSTlore:Acquiring content
From MYSTlore
As with any wiki, MYSTlore's main goal and idea is to
- gather information,
- filter it for relevance,
- verify its sources and then
- present it to the curious visitor.
The wiki software makes it easy to accomplish the second and third, and web browsers in general help with the last. But to collect pieces of "lore" to begin with takes effort.
Some others have already done the work — a lot of the very kind of information can be found on various places of the web, in the very format sought here. Indeed, it can be tempting to simply copy and paste the results to here and perhaps even claim it your own, but please don't do it. Legal issues aside, it's also rather unfair towards those who worked hard to do the actual research.
It's one thing to seek through forum posts, mailing list messages, the novels, DRC journals, even hidden source code on Cyan's website, and to post your findings here — that's great (though greater yet is to try and refer back to the source, |as described in detail here). Lots and lots of information is obscurely hidden, and even when it has been discovered before by someone else, it's perfectly kosher to post it here as original. Please, however, never ever copy another site's text verbatim, and especially don't try and rewrite it as to obscure such an action.
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[edit] Specifics
[edit] Not permitted
These are sources of information much in the same vein MYSTlore is. You can use them to back your claims up (and link back to them). You may not, however, use their work to your advantage when contributing to MYSTlore.
[edit] Possibly permitted
Most of Wikipedia's contribution are licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License, which makes it not allowed to post them here, because MYSTlore uses the incompatible Creative Commons by-nc 2.5 license.
However, you can go to individual article's histories (e.g., the history of Wikipedia's Atrus article) to look at individual versions and at who contributed what. Then (assuming a non-anonymous edit), you can proceed to contact the Wikipedia user and kindly ask them if they are willing to dual-license their work under the same license as MYSTlore. Also, you can check this article's talk page for authors who have already agreed to this dual-licensing. In that case, you are perfectly permitted to copy the work verbatim — but when editing, do make sure you attribute it properly in the Summary, and/or the article's talk page.
In a similar vein, MystWiki's contributions are licensed under the Creative Commons by-nc-sa 2.0 license, which, while mostly similar to ours, comes with this added (and incompatible) clause:
- Share Alike. If you alter, transform, or build upon this work, you may distribute the resulting work only under a license identical to this one.
Therefore, the same as above applies — you could try contacting individual users of MystWiki and gently asking them to dual-license their work in our Creative Commons by-nc 2.5 license as well.
[edit] Definitely permitted
- Certain subsites of The Uru Lives [4]:
These use the same Creative Commons by-nc 2.5 license as MYSTlore does. Sharing information between them and MYSTlore is therefore allowed and encouraged in both directions.
