Original vs sourced material

You might have noticed that we spoke about "sources" in the previous pages. It is time to explain what we meant. When users insert content in the storage engine, they may either mark it as an original content they made by themselves or make it a "quote".

A quote is content that is not supposed to be edited, unless improperly quoted. It can be translated, obviously, but the original should not be altered. This is especially efficient when importing public "collections", because the collection as such is usually copyrighted and the related licensing information must be properly stored and shown.

This is also an efficient way to mark that a given definition is "authoritative", for example when issued by a public Board that is in charge of defining some kind of standards. An authority object is by all means a usual class object, but defining it as an authority tells the system that it can be used to source objects.

Users that feel that an "authoritative" definition is not the best tool to define a profile object may still freely add other original definitions as they feel fit.

A peculiar use for this mechanism consisted in marking the import of the all the content originally stored in the Omegawiki database.