Place names from Wikipedia

General talk
1

Hello There,

I wondered if it would be OK to map this list of UK county village place names onto OSM :-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_places_in_Norfolk

Also using the coordinates, OS grid ref, or Lat Lon, from the individual village/place page such as this one :-
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alby_with_Thwaite

Would there be any problem in using that information?
Any other advice would be gratefully received.

Regards
Bernard

2

I guess you are talking about copying that data into the OSM database? In that case, it depends on whether or not you assume that copyright (or related legal protections) applies to large-scale copying of this data.

If it applies, then we cannot copy that information into OSM. Primarily, this is because Wikipedia’s CC-BY-SA 3.0 is incompatible with OSM’s CC-BY-SA 2.0 and particularly the future CT/ODbL. Furthermore, Wikipedia encourages deriving coordinates from Google Maps, which is a practice that we do not consider legally safe.

Besides the legal considerations, the usual guidelines for Automated edits would apply.

3

I checked coordinates in some wikipedia articles about Jyväskylä (Finland) in different languages. In these three examples the coordinates differed slightly from each other: taken from articles in Finnish, English and Norwegian. The “English point” is located about 200 metres away from the Finnish one. And the Norwegian one is more than 300 metres away from the Finnish one. The OSM place node of Jyväskylä is located some 100 metres SSE away from the “Finnish point”, on the town hall. I think the best thing to do is some survey of your own, rather than copy information directly from Wikipedia, Hikipedia, Uncyclopedia &c.

4

Wikimedia geolocated information may well be derived from sources incompatible with OpenStreetMap, please don’t use it!

For anywhere in Great Britain there are numerous usable sources (i.e., with a license known to be compatible with OSM) which are far more reliable and detailed: these included Out-of-copyright Ordnance Survey maps (NPE & Provisional edition 25k), Ordnance Survey OpenData (e.g., StreetView, Locator, Meridian etc)., NAPTAN (bus stops and location gazetteer).

For Norfolk all Civil Parishes have already been mapped from Ordnance Survey Boundary Line data. The parish you link to is mapped already (http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/relation/1022500). Many civil parishes in the British Isles do not correspond to villages (for instance Meering - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Meering - in Nottinghamshire has consistently had a population of 0 or 1 for most of its existence), or correspond to villages which disappeared hundreds of years ago.

You can use place=locality or place=hamlet for smaller named places within the parish which are not of village size.

5

Thanks for your advice, The first statement on this page
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Text_of_Creative_Commons_Attribution-ShareAlike_3.0_Unported_License
seems to say “You are free to share”
I did think it was to good to be true.

Regards
Bernard