Just to clarify, my concern is about externally made
databases, regardless
of whether these are imported directly into Wikidata, or have been
incorporated into Wikipedia first and imported into Wikidata from there. For
example, the population data in Wikipedia's list of ceremonial English
counties
(
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_ceremonial_counties_of_England), which
also features in the infoboxes of the articles on each county, would I think
be covered by database right under U.K law. Like other ONS material, it has
been made available under the OGL, which does impose some obligations on
re-users (somewhat similar to CC-BY).
This is in interesting case. However, while the database right gives
you certain rights, it does not give you a copyright (i.e. the conent
may be legally problematic, but it cannot be covered by CC BY-SA).
Thus, the use on Wikipedia is either exclusively licensed with an
obligation to prevent re-use by third parties (which is not the case,
WMF does not do this), or it is illegal, or acceptance of open re-use
is an implicit waiver of database rights.
I believe you can not allow it on Wikipedia but then NOT allow further reuse.
However, to clarify:
1. It is much preferable to add such data to Wikidata and include
their source in a structured way. Whether OGL or other licenses need
to be explicitly supported by Wikidata in the future will have to be a
separate discussion, on
Wikidata.org.
2. My goal in participating in this discussion is to avoid the
impression that re-use of Wikipedia content is not possible at all
without looking at each invidivual data element and record.
3. Wikidata plans to support a hierarchy of multiple data for the same
statement (multiple values from different sources for a single
property in a single item). This makes it possible (although not
required) to mix Wikipedia-harvested information with poor sourcing
with clean, well sourced data.
4. Not harvesting from Wikipedia implies to verify that almost all
information from Wikipedia is in WIkidata, but cleanly sourced, before
it si possible to migrate a class of infoboxes to Wikidata. I believe
this is an impossible task, making some import of Wikipedia-harvested
data necessary. Where better, sourced information exist, these would
take precedence.
Gregor