I haven't gotten around to implementing any of that yet, but it recently occurred to me there's another tab I'm going to need. (And when I say "recently" I mean over a week ago but I've been procrastinating writing this news post for no good reason.) I'm not entirely sure what to call it yet—"Credits"? "Sources"? Probably "Sources"—but it would be a good idea to have a tab where an article's creator can cite the other articles they've drawn upon. This tab won't be necessary for wholly original articles that aren't based on any other Wongery articles by other writers, but on those articles where it isn't necessary the tab just won't show up. (This was always the plan for all these tabs; if an article doesn't require maps, it won't have an Atlas tab, for instance, and if there are no associated models there won't be a Build tab, and so forth. I think I've got it pretty well worked out in my head how I want all this to function; I just haven't started the actual coding yet.)
Why is this necessary? Well, mainly because of licensing. Wongery content is currently licensed under a CC BY-SA license, but as I've also mentioned in a previous post, I plan to eventually also license it under a custom license I'm very tentatively calling a Static License. (And, on an utterly irrelevant side note, it just occurred to me that if I'm going to rename what I formerly called news posts to blog posts, which is something I do plan on doing, I should probably have the old "/news/" directory redirect to the new "/blog/" directory so I don't break all the old links. Although maybe I'll also implement a shortcut way to link to blog articles... hm.) Basically, the combined intent of the CC BY-SA license and the Static License (or whatever I end up calling it, which probably won't be that) is that anyone is welcome to do pretty much anything they want with Wongery content provided that they give proper credit and either (a) they also make their own work available for adaptation and redistribution (in which case they can use the CC BY-SA license), or (b) their work contains no moving images or NFTs (in which case they can use the Static License). (Or both, in which case they can use either license, or both.) However, if someone wants to make a commercial movie or video game that they don't want to share under a CC BY-SA license, then they'd have to negotiate with us for custom licensing terms.
That is, they'd have to negotiate with us if they were just using material from the Central Wongery. But eventually, we hope the Wongery will include contributions by others as well, in the Public Wongery and in private wongeries. What happens if someone wants to make a movie or video game based on someone else's content—that is, based on material from the Public Wongery or a private wongery, created by someone other than the Grandmaster Wongers? Well, here's the sticking point.
If the content in question is completely original, the creator's own work not based on anything from the Central Wongery, then no problem. The potential moviemaker/gamemaker just negotiates with the creator of that content; the Grandmaster Wongers aren't involved. But... the intent is that for content based on the work of multiple contributors, all those contributors must consent to any sort of custom licensing terms. Suppose someone makes articles in the Public Wongery about their own custom rew of Charos, for instance. The world itself is their own work, except that it draws on a lot of material from the Central Wongery about Charos and dream magic and various Charosi myriachs. Now suppose someone wants to make a video game set on that world. They'd have to negotiate with the person who created that world... but because it draws so heavily on content from the Central Wongery, the intent is that they'd have to negotiate with, er, me, as well.
But the Grandmaster Wongers don't even have to be involved. Suppose some Master Wonger describes in his private wongery a wholly original world, not based on anything from the Central Wongery. And now suppose someone else, in the Public Wongery, describes a particular character from that world. And now suppose someone wants to make a movie about that character. Unless the movie somehow divorces the character entirely from the setting and removes all references to the world they were originally set in, the intent is that the filmmakers would have to obtain a license not only from the creator of that character, but from the creator of the world as well, since they'd also be heavily using elements from their work.
I realize, of course, that all of these are long shots. I'm not saying it's likely anyone will ever want to make a video game or a movie based on Wongery content. Still, I'd like to think it's not entirely impossible, and so we ought to have our proverbial legal ducks in a row in case it does happen, improbable though it is.)
So the problem, and it's one that really should have occurred to me much sooner, is this: how would a potential licensor know whom they had to contact? If someone does want to license material from the Public Wongery or a private wongery, how do they know what other work that material draws on, and whom else they'd need permission from? And the answer is, well, the Sources tab. The idea is that if an article draws heavily from other articles—if someone's detailing a world set in someone else's universe, or a character in someone else's world—they'd list in the Sources tab what other work they'd drawn on. That way if it ever comes up, if someone ever does want to license Wongery content, there's an easy way to find out exactly whose permission they'd need.
Actually, come to think of it, even if it weren't for the possibility of custom licensing, technically we'd still be required to have something like the Sources tab just because of the terms of the CC BY-SA license—after all, the BY part of that license means that attribution is required. So, yeah, thinking of this just in terms of who has to be contacted to negotiate custom licenses is kind of overcomplicating things; this is something we ought to have anyway.
Also come to think of it, it's not necessarily just references to Wongery articles that should be included in the Credits tab; any other CC-BY content drawn on should be cited there too. For instance, there's a Public Wongery Do's and Don'ts page I have had mostly written for years but haven't finished and posted yet, and one of the "Don't"s currently listed there is this:
- Do not assume it's okay to use something that was released under an Open Gaming License. The Wongery is released under both the Open Game License and a Creative Commons License (and the Static License, for that matter), so for anything incorporated into the Wongery the same must be true. You cannot, therefore, for instance refer to a "xorn" in anything you submit to the Public Wongery; "xorns", a type of monster originally from Dungeons & Dragons, are part of Wizards of the Coast's intellectual property, and are not in the public domain (even though they have been released under an Open Gaming License).
Thus far, the Grandmaster Wongers haven't really drawn on each other's content. Well, not counting words that one of us coined that are used in the other Grandmasters' work, like "ellogy" and "darsis", and "celemology", but those we're okay with anyone using—you can use those words too if you want; you don't have to ask our permission. But I haven't created my own veigur in Tada's universe of Lothenmydhe; Antefyn hasn't invented their own resident of Alarcus's world of Thorgh; and so on. But I won't rule out that this may happen in the future. If it does, then honestly I think the Grandmaster Wongers are capable of working things out among ourselves and don't really need to cite each other's articles in the Credits tab... but we'll probably do so anyway, just to make things official and to set an example.
So. I don't know when I'm going to finally get around to implementing the custom tabs for the Wongery. (Among other things, I'm probably going to want to take some more PHP and Javascript courses first, because as it is I don't know what I'm doing and I'm way over my head, but that's never stopped me before. Or actually I guess maybe it has, but no specific occasions come to mind.) But when I do, it now looks like there'll be at least five new tabs: Atlas, Build, Game, Works, and now Sources.
Yeah, I've got a lot of work ahead of me, and have not been putting in the time I need to. I'm going to post this blog post, and then I'm going to get back to writing and editing some Wongery articles...