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What is the current relation between these two? I see collaboration pages on the OSM wiki as well as on Wikipedia, but it is not very clear how an average editor can help in this area. Does it make sense to manually add Wikipedia tags to OSM while many Wikipedia articles have coordinates? Would it be better to partially automate this process, import Wikipedia coordinates to OSM and only correct mistakes? |
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OSM and wikipedia have different license opinions. Wikipedia bases itself on the fact that facts are non-licansable in USA. Almost all of their content are therefore copied from different sources. In most of the world facts can be licensed and therefore by some standards wikipedia is violating licenses. Therefore data from wikipedia can not be imported to OSM. For example if someone would import a location from Google maps to wikipedia and then to OSM. Lawyers at Google might be able to claim that the exact position is not a fact, that since the servers are in UK wether or not it is a fact is irrelevant or that the data is not allowed to be distributed in countries where facts are licensable. Wikipedia is possibly violating some licenses by importing locations from others but this is overlooked by the licensees because it is so little violations and not worth to stop it, but if OSM would import map data from wikipedia someone might take notice and stop the practice for all. The collaboration pages deals with other things like including a slippery map in wikipedia and links to wikipedia in the OSM database with the wikipedia= tag. I would not say most of content in Wikipedia is copied from different sources. Most of the content is created by users (e.g. is unique) or is imported from PD sources. Therefore, I still cant understand your point... what is a "fact" in your opinion? Copyright is (almost) the same everywhere in the world and that is how free licenses (e.g. cc-by-sa) work, am I right?
(12 Oct '10, 09:37)
Kozuch
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Most of Wikipedia's content is indeed copied from different sources. Wikipedia even codifies this into a rule: no original research. Secondly, the IP protection afforded to databases of factual information is vastly different in different countries. At one extreme, the US affords very little protection: a compilation of facts can be copied by anyone. At the other, the UK affords protection based on the "sweat of the brow" - the more effort it took to put together the compilation of facts, the more protection you have. CC-BY-SA is not a licence well suited for factual information and that's why OpenStreetMap is considering moving away from it. |
