[OSM-talk] Using Wikipedia to add names in other languages

[Christoph Hormann]

Arguing about licenses and their compatibility does not really help in 
this context since having formally compatible license (or the related 
argument that Wikidata is CC0 and therefore by definition the license 
is a non-issue) would not help.  We have just seen in

https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/karitotp/diary/43824

that trusting third parties with assurances that data they don't 
actually own is all right to use does not work.  So even if the 
Wikimedia foundation would specifically allow OSM to use certain 
information from Wikipedia without restrictions this is not really 
helpful since what they certainly will never do is give assurances that 
information in Wikipedia or Wikidata is free of third party rights.

From the perspective of OSM things would actually be quite simple:  We 
are based on original research and on-the-ground verifiable 
information.  Any data that is not gathered through original research 
by the mapper should only be used if specific permission is given by 
whoever did the original research generating that data.  That 
specifically excludes Wikipedia since Wikipedia is specifically not 
meant for collecting original research.

Sticking to this principle would serve both in avoiding legal troubles 
and maintaining high quality of data in OSM.  Unfortunately not 
everyone agrees to that.

The Contributor Terms:

https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Licence/Contributor_Terms

are somewhat solomonic in that regard - The contributors agree to only 
contribute data that is legally sound as far as they know - but nothing 
requires you to refrain from burying your head in the sand so to speak.

Practically we have already seen lots of systematic copying of name tags 
from Wikipedia/Wikidata to OSM in the past years.  You can see this 
from correlations in the naming patterns (including errors) and from 
the editing patterns (mappers adding names in many different languages 
they cannot possibly all have first hand information about).

IMO the quality and data maintainance problems resulting from this are 
much more pressing than the legal issues.

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