[OSM-talk] (licence of wikidata) was: Can wikidata links help fight name inflation?

[Christoph Hormann]

On Sunday 07 June 2015, Simon Poole wrote:
>
> - individual facts extracted from wikipedia articles. From a WMF pov
> unproblematic since "facts can't be copyrighted", from an OSM pov
> problematic because they might have originally been extracted from a
> 3rd party source and might be from a database rights pov, a
> substantial extract of that source (for example POI data from google)
> if included wholesale in OSM.

*Individual* facts are never an issue, neither under copyright nor 
database rights, it only becomes a problem w.r.t. database rights once 
you systematically transfer data on a larger scale.  In other words a 
single source=wikipedia is not a problem, it only becomes an issue when 
it occurs in larger numbers.  It is of course somewhat difficult to 
draw the line here.  But no mapper should feel required to refrain from 
looking into wikipedia while mapping IMO or ban copyrighted books from 
his/her library out of fear for license problems.

Of course it never hurts to verify information from Wikipedia (or from 
books for that matter) with a second independent source.

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