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

[Eugene Alvin Villar]

On Mon, Jun 8, 2015 at 4:06 AM, Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch> 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.
>
> - wikidata data: the WMF claims no database rights in the collection of
> individual facts and the reasoning for CC0 is based on the "facts can't
> be copyrighted" doctrine. In other words, we could wholesale import
> wikidata in to OSM from a WMF pov, however as already said, the
> provenance of the data is unclear and has the same issues as facts
> extracted from wikipedia articles. @Eugene I doubt if the WMF was
> actually thinking of DCMA requests against wikidata content in the
> published policy, as following one would damage their stance on facts
> not being copyrightable. In any case it is clear that they have not been
> policing their sources as SomeoneElse points outs.
>

Note that I am quite aware of the issues surrounding adding data from
Wikidata wholesale *into* OSM. I actually pointed this out during my
presentation at last year's Wikimania about OSM and Wikimedia
collaboration/cooperation:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=File:Wikimedia_and_OpenStreetMap_%28Wikimania_2014_presentation%29.pdf&page=50

For this reason, I agree that we can't use Wikidata as a wholesale source
for OSM unless we are sure of the provenance of the data and its
compatibility with ODbL irrespective of Wikidata's CC0 license.

On the other hand, I don't think this should prevent third parties from
mixing and matching Wikidata with OSM to produce an ODbL-derived database
given that they are aware of the risks (aka legal minefield that you
pointed out before).
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