Before we begin, here are some important links for Licensing Staff:
- Licensing Guide (SCP Wiki) - This guide lays out the basic terms of our site's license in layman's terms.
- The Dummy's Guide to Licenses (SCP Wiki) - This guide gives you a breakdown on what licenses are allowed on the wiki.
- SCP Licensing Wiki (Licensing Wiki) - This page gives a more complex breakdown of other, more obscure licenses and their interactions with our own.
- Tineye - A highly reliable reverse image searcher.
- Tag Search (SCP Wiki) - How we will be finding pages in need of the _licensebox tag.
- License Box (SCP Wiki) - The crux of what we will be doing here today. Please read this link thoroughly before reading this page.
INTRO
So you've been drafted into the never-ending war that is keeping our site's pages licenseboxed. Congratulations. It didn't break Elenee, it hasn't broken me or Naepic, and it won't break you. It may feel a little scary at first, but rest assured, the task is pretty easy as long as you follow the steps. So what are the steps? I'm so glad you asked!
HOW TO IDENTIFY PAGES IN NEED OF THE BOX
When looking for pages that need to be licenseboxed, you will typically begin your quest at the Tag Search page linked above. Go to that page and type "not_licensebox" in the text field and hit enter. It should look like this:
From there, you can narrow down your search, so for example if you only want to look at Tales or Goi Formats that need to be licenseboxed, you can then type "tale" or "goi-format" into the text field and hit enter again.
LOCATING SOURCES
The meat and potatoes of the process. There are multiple ways this can happen, and we are gonna go through as many as I can think of. If you find a different way of this happening, please alert the Licensing Captain o Vice Captain (whoever they may be at the time) and tell them about it, so they can write it up in this section.
IMAGE SOURCES IN THE COMMENTS
Most of the time, people who don't licensebox will place the source of their image in the comments of their article, typically in the Author Post, or in some cases, someone else will do the kind thing and post it for them. Look for this type of post in the comments of the article, usually near the top of the first page:
This type of thing usually happens in cases where the post predates the licensebox component, or in cases where the author is forgetful.
IMAGE SOURCES IN THE INFO MODULE
Info modules are a little clickable "i" node that appears beside the Rating Module. An example of it is highlighted below:
These can sometimes contain the image sources of an article, as seen on this one:
This, again, typically only appears in older articles that predate the licensebox component or in translations. More on translations later.
IMAGE SOURCES IN THE PAGE SOURCE (AKA HOTLINKING)
This is when the images are not hosted directly on the wiki, but rather an exterior site like Imgur or even Wikimedia Commons. Hotlinking is not allowed on the Wiki, except for very few Staff-approved scenarios. If you notice a new page is hotlinking an image and its not trending negative, please PM the author or contact a Staff member with Mod Tools to localize the image. If you're looking for the source of an image and the previous two methods have failed you, try clicking the Page Source button on the bottom of the page and looking at the links of the images, like so:
Note the highlighted text. See how the name of the file is written out between underscores? Type out the name (without the underscores) into Google and add Wikimedia Commons to the query, as such:
Which leads us to the source, this page:
_(cropped).jpg){kind=link}
And from there, we can simply scroll down to check the license. If they lead you to a site like Wikimedia Commons, odds are its probably compliant, but we still need to do our due diligence and check. Other image sites will be a little harder, but we will cover what to do if you're not able to discern where an image comes from further down.
Note that this particular trick only works with Wikimedia Commons.
For a similar trick with Flickr, follow these instructions:
Simply enter into your browser the following:
www.flickr.com/photo.gne?id=
And then enter the number before the first underscore in the URL you find.
IMAGE SOURCE UNCLEAR/MIA
This one happens a lot. Let's say you're looking at an article that doesn't cite its image sources. What do you do?
Step one is to hit CTRL+T (or whatever opens a new tab on your setup) and open up Tineye. As we mentioned up top, Tineye is a very reliable reverse image searcher, which is very good at tracking down the origins of images. To use it, simply tab back to the image, click on it, and drag it back to the Tineye tab. Give it a moment to search, and it will return with the source of an image.
From there, the first result is usually the correct one, so we can go in there and check its license.
But what if the image comes back with 0 results?
Well, we've got nothing left to do but ask the author the source of the image. Most of the time they took it themselves or made it themselves, but sometimes it can be AI, which at time of writing, is not allowed on the wiki. If you suspect an image is made with AI, please contact a member of the AI Team.
Anyway, give the author a week (and make sure you set a reminder!) to respond to you, be it over Discord, IRC, Twitter, Bluesky, smoke signal, carrier pigeon, or Wikidot PM. Once they do, you can apply the licensebox. If they do not, remove the image since it could not be reliably sourced.
HOW TO ACTUALLY DO THE THING
So now that you know how to find the source of an image for a page, we need to actually get down to doing the thing. For this part of the process, you will need to have the License Box Component open.
Scroll down to the bottom of the page and hit "Edit", then scroll all the way down to the bottom of the edit box, and in a new line at the absolute end of the text, input the license box. What this looks like will vary depending on whether or not the article has images, co-authors, composite images, or is a translation; more on that later. Below is just one of the many possible forms a licensebox can take:
I highly recommend reading through the entire License Box Component page in full, it goes into specifics and is much more granular than I could be here.
Once this is done, hit Save on the page. After you have saved, scroll down to the bottom of the page again and this time click on "Tags", which will open a little text field. Type "_licensebox" at the start and hit space to make sure that there is indeed a space between the new tag and the tags already there, then hit Save Tags. It should look like the image below, highlighted for emphasis:
Once this is done, you should be good to go!
By the way, if the sources are all compliant, make sure you also add the _cc tag and the _cc4 tag if it uses an image that is CC BY SA 4.0.
PAGES NOT TO LICENSEBOX
The following are page types you can ignore the licensebox for:
Pages tagged with:
Pages in the categories:
- unlisted:
- component:
A NOTE ON TRANSLATIONS
Hey, foreshadowing! Anway, translations. You can tell these apart from other articles because they will have the international tag and accompanying invisible language tag; i.e., _es, _ru, _jp, etc. These might require you to do some digging, so pay attention. Have you ever noticed the Interwiki Module at the bottom of the side bar?
If the translator/poster has not already indicated the source of any images, as well as the original author/s, you might have to go check the original wiki's author post or apply the image search technique to it. Other branches play a lot looser with the license sometimes, so their images might not be compliant with our own. This is where the Licensing Wiki page comes in handy, to review for other, more obscure licenses interactions with CC BY-SA 3.0. Just review for license compliance and fill out the licensebox info, easy as cake.
But for the more complicated part, the original author and translator. This will be similar to applying a license box to an article that has co-authors. Just say that the original article was written by User X, and was translated by User Y. This information is usually in the author post of the translator/poster, but you might have to visit an international wiki to find out by clicking on "History", just in another language. Most browsers have in-built translation services, so this shouldn't be too hard.