I recently discovered a website called WIKI2, “Wikipedia republished”, which takes the contents of Wikipedia pages and adds a prettier page layout. The company behind WIKI2 can do this without fear of being charged with copyright violation because Wikipedia’s owners, the WikiMedia Foundation, have given permission in advance by using free culture licenses (GNU FDL and CC-BY-SA).

WIKI2 also includes a search bot, “Tubie”, that trawls through search engines for other content that may be relevant to the subject of a page, things like YouTube videos, and embeds them in the page. Although the creators of the other bits and pieces embedded by Tubie may not be under free culture licenses, embedding video (and other multimedia elements) in a web page is generally accepted as being the same as linking to a page of text, as long as the source of the video is clearly displayed, and there is a link to the original.

Ideally the Tubie bot would also be licensed as free code software (can’t find any reference to what license it’s under), so Wikipedians could re-use WIKI2’s work too. A clone of Tubie (Wookie? could be tweaked to search through WikimediaCommons, and other sites hosting only free culture works, suggesting multimedia elements for use in Wikipedia pages. The bots suggestions could be checked by a human editor, to make sure they were indeed under a compatible license, relevant to the page suggested, in the right language for that version of the page etc.

