[cc-community] linking as attribution?

cc at phizz.demon.co.uk cc at phizz.demon.co.uk
Thu Feb 25 05:02:27 EST 2010


chriswaterguy at appropedia.org wrote:
> I've been talking with an open knowledge project which is using Wikipedia as
> one of its sources. However, they attribution consists only of a link to the
> Wikipedia articles. We have differing opinions on whether this is adequate,
> but I'm no expert, so I forward their interpretation for comment:
> For Wikipedia, I have gone based on the first paragraph of this
> section for my compliance:
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Mirrors_and_Forks#License
> That link states that "any derivative of works from Wikipedia must be
> released under that same license, must state that it is released under
> that license, and must acknowledge the contributors (which can be
> accomplished with a link back to that article on Wikipedia)"
> So the way I interpreted that is that our entire site
> is under the same license, the entire site is released under the same
> license, and every single plant article on the site, regardless of
> whether it has any material from Wikipedia has a link back to the same
> article on Wikipedia (whether such an article even exists or not).
> Since it says acknowledging contributors can be accomplished with a
> link back, I have thought I covered everything necessary.  If you
> think it reads differently, or I should move the wikipedia links from
> external links up to references, or add some text, I'd like to hear
> your thoughts.

I think it depends on what it is you are taking from wikipedia, how much, and what the wikipedia source is. Large parts of wikipedia is not original but a cut&paste from other sources. For example this page is 80% copy of the tourist leaflet:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Th%C3%A9r%C3%A8se_of_Lisieux

In other cases the material is not copyrightable in the first place. For example one can't copyright the fact that a plant belongs to a particular taxonomy order, family, and genus, and unless you are performing a verbatim copy, or only slightly modifying the content of such wiki pages then such information is not covered by any license.






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