[Imports] Advice on Import of Ghana District Boundaries

[Christoph Hormann]

On Wednesday 27 September 2017, Enock Seth Nyamador wrote:
>
> Ghana has admin boundaries for districts, 216 of them​.[1]
> ​Personally I think it should be available to the public at no cost
> or​ under any copyright since it has been created by a government
> agency. From​ ​data (​mostly shapefiles​) I've c​o​me across relating
> to this, there ​seems​ to be no valid metadata ​about what/who/when
> and Ghana's Open data portal​​[2] doesn't have anything on this​
> ​either​​.

You have not pointed to specific data source for the administrative 
boundaries (neither the Wikipedia page nor the Ghana data portal seem 
to contain any - the Wikipedia page only contains images with unclear 
provenance of the information in them) so i cannot give you any 
assessment on if whatever data you have is usable.

> Taking a look at this [3​] and the​ir respective​ source​s as
> Wikipedia.​ My question here is​n't this enough to go ahead and
> document an import of these districts of Ghana based on Wikipedia
> since there already exist data​ in OSM​ based on this?

No.  Content from Wikipedia can be a legally admissible source for 
mapping in OSM - for example scanned out of copyright maps or 
illustrations in the public domain created based on data sources 
equally in the public domain.  But there is also a lot of Wikipedia 
content that cannot be legally used for OSM.

In general Wikipedia does not usually care about database rights.  If 
someone draws a map and uploads it to Wikipedia and puts it in the 
public domain that is accepted there even if the content of the map is 
traced from Google Maps or other non-open copyrighted sources.  For OSM 
such stuff is not usable as mapping sources though.

If you use content from Wikipedia as a source for mapping you should 
always reference the individual source.  Tagging source=wikipedia is 
not advisable.

The general recommendation for administrative boundary data is to 
contact the government agencies that have such data and ask them for 
the data and the permission for using it in OSM.  This can be both 
federal agencies or local ones - local agencies are often better 
sources for accurate information, but this of course depends a lot on 
the country.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/