> Just to clarify, my concern is about externally made databases, regardless > of whether these are imported directly into Wikidata, or have been > incorporated into Wikipedia first and imported into Wikidata from there. For > example, the population data in Wikipedia's list of ceremonial English > counties > (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ceremonial_counties_of_England), which > also features in the infoboxes of the articles on each county, would I think > be covered by database right under U.K law. Like other ONS material, it has > been made available under the OGL, which does impose some obligations on > re-users (somewhat similar to CC-BY).
This is in interesting case. However, while the database right gives you certain rights, it does not give you a copyright (i.e. the conent may be legally problematic, but it cannot be covered by CC BY-SA). Thus, the use on Wikipedia is either exclusively licensed with an obligation to prevent re-use by third parties (which is not the case, WMF does not do this), or it is illegal, or acceptance of open re-use is an implicit waiver of database rights. I believe you can not allow it on Wikipedia but then NOT allow further reuse. However, to clarify: 1. It is much preferable to add such data to Wikidata and include their source in a structured way. Whether OGL or other licenses need to be explicitly supported by Wikidata in the future will have to be a separate discussion, on Wikidata.org. 2. My goal in participating in this discussion is to avoid the impression that re-use of Wikipedia content is not possible at all without looking at each invidivual data element and record. 3. Wikidata plans to support a hierarchy of multiple data for the same statement (multiple values from different sources for a single property in a single item). This makes it possible (although not required) to mix Wikipedia-harvested information with poor sourcing with clean, well sourced data. 4. Not harvesting from Wikipedia implies to verify that almost all information from Wikipedia is in WIkidata, but cleanly sourced, before it si possible to migrate a class of infoboxes to Wikidata. I believe this is an impossible task, making some import of Wikipedia-harvested data necessary. Where better, sourced information exist, these would take precedence. Gregor _______________________________________________ Wikidata-l mailing list Wikidata-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikidata-l
