[Imports] Advice on Import of Ghana District Boundaries

[Paul Norman]

On 9/27/2017 12:19 PM, 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​​.​

Copyright and database rights don't work like this. In general, 
something is copyrighted on publication. The US Federal government is 
different within the US, but it's an exception. I can't find anything 
about Ghana government works automatically being public domain. Parts of 
the site are broken, but some of the datasets have a license indicated. 
One doesn't.

The datasets with a license indicated say they're ODbL, which is 
compatible with OSM and could be imported. However, I can't find any 
shapefiles which you mentioned finding - where are those from?

> 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? If yes or no, 
> why and what do you recommend?

Wikipedia is not a license-compatible source.

Could you provide a link to the data you're proposing to import? It's 
not really clear to me exactly where it's from.