On 28 Jul 2009, at 18:41, Christoph Böhme wrote: > o...@edwardbetts.com schrieb: > >> Christoph Böhme <christ...@b3e.net> wrote: >>> Many places have wikipedia entries (even villages). If we can manage >>> to automatically look the entries up and extract the relevant >>> information (population size) from the info box we could probably >>> classify a lot of places. >> >> I'm afraid we can't use population data, it is under Crown Copyright. > > I don't know much about the licencing but I find it slightly odd that > Wikipedia can distribute its contents under a CC-BY-SA licene when it > contains information that is under a more restrictive licence. How > am I > supposed to know that population numbers are not covered by the > CC-BY-SA licence? > > I don't want to start a huge discussion here about the legal issues of > using the population numbers. I'm just curious to learn why Crown > Copyrighted data can be in Wikipedia.
All information in Wikipedia must be sourced from elsewhere because it must be verifiable. (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability) References should be to reputable sources, such as top newspapers etc. There are guidelines ensuring that copyright material is not used excessively (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Non-free_content) but in summary it seems that as long as an article is made of information taken from many sources and written for Wikipedia and is not cut and pasted from one source then it has been 'freed'. It is then possible to take information from Wikipedia and reuse it with acknowledgement as per the following: "Permission to reproduce and modify text on Wikipedia has already been granted to anyone anywhere by the authors of individual articles as long as such reproduction and modification complies with licensing terms (see below and Wikipedia:Mirrors and forks for specific terms). Images may or may not permit reuse and modification; the conditions for reproduction of each image should be individually checked. The only exceptions are those cases in which editors have violated Wikipedia policy by uploading copyrighted material without authorization, or with copyright licensing terms which are incompatible with those Wikipedia authors have applied to the rest of Wikipedia content. While such material is present on the Wikipedia (before it is detected and removed), it will be a copyright violation to copy it. For permission to use it, one must contact the owner of the copyright of the text or illustration in question; often, but not always, this will be the original author. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Copyrights Regards, Peter > > Christoph > > > >> -- >> Edward. >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Talk-transit mailing list >> Talk-transit@openstreetmap.org >> http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-transit > > _______________________________________________ > Talk-transit mailing list > Talk-transit@openstreetmap.org > http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-transit _______________________________________________ Talk-transit mailing list Talk-transit@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-transit