Sources & citations

Libre Aquatics Wiki is a reference, so articles should say where their facts come from. This page sets the conventions, which also keep the wiki on the right side of copyright.

Licensing¶

The wiki’s text is published under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-SA 4.0). Anyone may reuse and adapt it, including commercially, provided they credit the source and license any adaptation on the same terms. The site code is published separately under the MIT License.

Two things that licence does not cover. Sources cited by an article stay under their own copyright: a manual or rulebook is linked at its publisher, never reproduced here, and quoting a fact from it does not place the document under our licence. Product names, company names, and logos remain the trademarks of their owners, as described under Trademarks below.

Images are licensed individually and listed on Image credits. To report material that infringes your rights, email info@libreaquatics.org.

Cite and link, never host¶

• Link to the official copy of a manual, rulebook, or spec on the publisher’s own site. Do not upload or mirror vendor manuals or rulebooks here; that would republish a whole copyrighted work.
• Keep a full citation, not just a URL, so a reference survives a broken link: document number, title, version/date, and the official link. Example: Colorado Time Systems, F1034, Gen7 Serial Timer User Guide, coloradotime.com.
• Facts are free; wording is not. Rewrite the useful information (specs, procedures, part numbers) in your own words with a citation. Do not copy manual or rulebook prose verbatim, and redraw diagrams rather than reproducing them.

Images¶

• Prefer your own photographs or images used with the copyright holder’s written permission.
• Do not publish images scraped from catalogs, manuals, or the web. An entry is useful text-first; add a photo only once it is properly licensed.
• Credit and license every non-original image, and remove anything on a rights holder’s request. The running list is on Image credits.
• Give every image descriptive alt text so screen-reader users get the same information; use empty alt only for purely decorative images (WCAG 1.1.1). See Accessibility.

Where to find freely licensed photos¶

Photos here come from repositories of public-domain or freely licensed media. Prefer public domain or CC0 (no attribution burden); CC BY is acceptable with a credit line. Share-alike (-SA) images are also acceptable, because the wiki’s own text is CC BY-SA 4.0 and each image is credited with its own licence on Image credits. Do not use images under a non-commercial (-NC) or no-derivatives (-ND) clause: those terms conflict with the wiki’s licence and would make the page non-free. Always confirm the licence on the file’s own description page, not a search thumbnail.

• Wikimedia Commons: each file states its licence; categories such as Swimming competitions and Starting blocks (swimming) are good starting points.
• Openverse: aggregates 800M+ works and filters by licence, but re-verify each result on its origin page.
• U.S. federal government imagery (for example U.S. Navy/DoD photos) is public domain and a reliable source of competition and pool photographs.

Facts to record for the credits list: author, licence and version, and the source URL, captured when the image is downloaded.

Trademarks¶

Product and company names (and logos) are the trademarks of their owners. Naming a product to refer to it is fine; Libre Aquatics Wiki is not affiliated with or endorsed by any manufacturer or governing body.

Icons¶

If an article needs an icon, use one from a permissively licensed set and embed it as inline SVG (or an asset under assets/), noting the set and licence in the credits list. Suitable sets include:

Set	Licence
Material Design Icons (preferred)	Apache 2.0
Octicons	MIT
FontAwesome Free	icons CC BY 4.0, font SIL OFL 1.1

Do not use icon sets made of company and brand logos (for example Simple Icons): reproducing a logo conflicts with the nominative-use rule above. Give a meaningful icon an accessible label; a purely decorative icon needs none.

Fonts¶

The preview cards that appear when a page is shared on social media are drawn at build time in Noto Sans, licensed under the SIL Open Font License 1.1. The font files and a copy of that licence are kept in the wiki’s repository under src/fonts/. They are used only while the site is being built: the pages themselves are set in the reader’s own system fonts, so no font is served to visitors.