Am I allowed to use Wikipedia content?

licensing wikipedia
Kai Huppmann picture Kai Huppmann · May 9, 2011 · Viewed 7.4k times · Source

I'm always confused when reading licenses ....

I want to implement (to be honest implementation is already done) a commercial iPad app which makes use of content from wikipedia. Am I allowed to

  • Embed hardcoded links that point to wikipedia articles and display those in an in app browser?
  • Implement an aggresive caching that mirrors part of wikipedia to make content available offline?
  • manually download wikipedia articles during dev time and bundle the content within my app?

Answer

Andrey picture Andrey · May 9, 2011

Wikipedia's content is licensed under Creative Commons, the one that allows commercial usage. Open Main page and scroll to the very bottom of it. See that small text:

Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike License; additional terms may apply. See Terms of Use for details.

You should have checked that investing time implementing something.

Here is the license itself (slightly shortened by me, not original text):

You are free:

  • to Share—to copy, distribute and transmit the work, and
  • to Remix—to adapt the work

Under the following conditions:

  • Attribution
  • Share Alike

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