[OSM-talk] British stations in Wikipedia vs. OSM

Peter Miller peter.miller at itoworld.com
Fri Nov 9 19:53:21 GMT 2007


> 
> Message: 1
> Date: Fri, 9 Nov 2007 18:13:52 +0100
> From: Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org>
> Subject: Re: [OSM-talk] British stations in Wikipedia vs. OSM	(was:
> 	railway=subway_entrance approved!)
> To: Edward Betts <edward at debian.org>
> Cc: talk at openstreetmap.org
> Message-ID: <20071109171351.GB31788 at lochewe.mathy.remote.org>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1
> 
> HI,
> 
> > I wrote some code to compare the British stations in Wikipedia with the
> ones
> > in OSM. Right now we have 60.8% coverage. There are a few disused
> stations
> > incorrectly included in the Wikipedia data. Sometimes the names in
> Wikipedia
> > and OSM don't match.
> >
> > Take a look at http://edwardbetts.com/osm/stations.html
> >
> > Green means the station is OSM, red means it isn't.
> 
> But always be aware that if we did anything that Wikipedia contri-
> butors could judge to be a "derived work", we'd have to license OSM
> under the FDL, and vice versa...

A quick reality check here.

The question that comes to mind is why? Why would wikipedia and OSM end up
fighting and who gains what by doing so?

To have a legal fight there both needs to be a rule that is broken, together
with reasonable proof and also a motive. There may well be a rule that would
technically be broken from moving information across, I am sure you are more
knowledgable about that than me, but there also needs to be proof and
motive. Proof may be hard to establish and anyway the result of proof would
solely be that that persons work would be removed from the relevant project
(be it OSM or Wikipedia), not the failure of the project. There also needs
to be a motive, which is normally financial. Well I can see the eventual
owners of TeleAtlas and Navteq taking a hard line with OSM, but wikipedia?
What motive would they have and how would they raise the money and what
would they gain. Conversely, do you see OSM taking on Wikipedia and what
would OSM gain?

I do agree that OSM should point out that copying data on-mass from
wikipedia is not ok (assuming the licensing are indeed not compatible), but
given the different purposes and content of the projects it will be hard to
see anything else causing a problem.

My current message is more that we should be creating many more cross-links
and synergy between the projects. We should add stub wikipedia articles for
significant features we survey and link to them from OSM, and we should
clarify and correct wikipedia where we see errors and link it back to OSM.


Peter



> 
> Bye
> Frederik
> 
> --
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49?00.09' E008?23.33'
> 






More information about the talk mailing list