MaxTravelz:How to re-use MaxTravelz guides

From MaxTravelz

MaxTravelz articles and images are available under a MaxTravelz:Copyleft license. This means you can redistribute and modify them in any medium, as long as you follow a few simple rules.

About our license

Our license, the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0, requires three main things from people redistributing an article:

You give attribution to the authors of the article.
You make any derivative works available under the same license.
You notify readers and other users of the license.

The following is our interpretation of the license requirements. It is not legal advice.

Attribution

You can give attribution to the authors according to their real names or MaxTravelz user names. For users identified with an IP address instead of a user name, you can use "Anonymous" or "Anonymous user of MaxTravelz". You don't have to list any name more than once.

Every page on MaxTravelz has a credits block at the end of the page; this should be sufficient for attribution.

Each MaxTravelz article also has an HTML link element of type meta that points to an RDF file with the author names. This may be easier to parse automatically.

For images, the author history can be found on the corresponding Image: page.

ShareAlike

Any derivative works based on MaxTravelz articles must also be licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0.

For an article, a derivative work would be a Web page based solely or primarily on the content of the article. Including a MaxTravelz article into a full Web site doesn't require that the whole site be under the Attribution-ShareAlike 1.0, just the particular page.

For an image, a modified version of the image file is a derivative work. A Web page or other presentation that includes the image doesn't count as a derivative work, and doesn't have to be under the same license.

Notice

You must provide a link to the Attribution-ShareAlike license to notify readers and users of their rights to the article text or image. The URL of the license should be sufficient.

Practice

These are some practical notes for re-using MaxTravelz guides.

There is no bulk download for all of the MaxTravelz guides -- yet. We're working on making XML, HTML, and MediaWiki SQL versions available for download.
MaxTravelz.org is a service for creating and editing these free guides. We can't support the bandwidth and processing requirements of uses not tuned to this purpose. We prefer not to serve files or articles if they're framed or embedded into other pages.
If you create a Web mirror, it can help if you put a link on MaxTravelz:Mirrors.
There is a mailing list for announcements of MaxTravelz news. It is a low-volume, moderated list and should only send you mail once a week at most. If you are doing a lot of republishing of MaxTravelz content, you should be on this list (but are not required to). Send email to majordomo at MaxTravelz dot org with "subscribe announcements" as the body of the message.

Link back

MaxTravelz articles are written, edited, and illustrated by readers. Our quality improves when readers can fix factual errors, misspellings, or other make other improvements.

For this reason, we ask that you also link back to the original MaxTravelz article, allowing your readers to update it. This is just a request; it's not part of the license requirements. A link back is not a substitute for following the terms of the license.

Future

We're committed to making MaxTravelz guides practical to redistribute. We think that redistribution is a great way to get important information to travellers who need it.

Some improvements to watch for:

Bulk download of all MaxTravelz articles in XML and HTML format.
SQL downloads of all MaxTravelz articles.

Note that we don't have an easy way to send out full-site dumps that conform to both the copyleft and the privacy policy. We need to balance the need to give all users attribution for their work with the need to protect personal information like passwords and email addresses. There's not a built-in easy way to do it right now, and it's a low priority for developer and admin time.