On Sat, Nov 28, 2015 at 10:13 AM, Gergő Tisza gtisza@gmail.com wrote:
("Shameful" was an unnecessarily confrontational choice of word; I apologize.)
Thanks.
There is also the practical matter of facts not being copyrightable in the US, and non-zero CC licenses not being particularly useful for databases (what you want is something like the GPL Affero for databases and CC does not have such a license).
That hasn't stopped DBpedia and other open-content databases (the Paleobiology database for example[1]) from using CC licenses requiring attribution.
DBpedia arguably had to, because its database is derived from Wikipedia, which has an attribution required, share-alike license: "DBpedia is derived from Wikipedia and is distributed under the same licensing terms as Wikipedia itself."[2]
To the extent that Wikidata draws on Wikipedia, its CC0 license would appear to be a gross violation of Wikipedia's share-alike license requirement.
The generation of data always has a social context. Knowing where data come from is a good thing.
[1] https://creativecommons.org/weblog/entry/41216 [2] http://wiki.dbpedia.org/terms-imprint