Can we import geocoordinates from Wikipedia?
Wikipedia articles are often geocoded, and it has been suggested a number of times that we should import data from Wikipedia (for example, using the pages on villages in a particular country to add place=village nodes). However, a substantial portion of those coordinates are derived from Google Maps. Wikipedia, which operates under U.S. law (where their servers are), considers facts like coordinates as non-copyrightable. OpenStreetMap operates under UK and European law, which gives special protections for databases and collections of facts, such as Google Maps and Google’s data. Because of this lineage of the Wikipedia coordinates, the data is considered tainted as far as OpenStreetMap is concerned, and it is an established principle in OpenStreetMap that we don’t import geodata from Wikipedia.
