Wikivoyage:How to re-use Wikivoyage guides

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You can reuse Wikivoyage travel guides! Perhaps you're hosting a conference and would like to have a travel guide for your venue? Perhaps you have an idea for a mobile or desktop application that would be better with a travel guide? Perhaps you'd just like to have a travel guide on your blog? Our crowdsourced travel guides are free for you to redistribute and modify if you just follow a few simple steps.

When you redistribute Wikivoyage content, you just have to do the following:

  • Attribute the authors of the content. This can be done by simply providing a link back to the Wikivoyage page or, if you are making a printed guide, by providing a link in the hard copy. Alternatively, you can directly credit each of the authors listed in the history of the article.
  • Include the licence. For the text, this is always CC-by-SA 3.0. For images, it can vary a little. Just reproduce the licence that is on the image page at Wikimedia Commons. All the image licences are free and open.

There are no other requirements.

If you modify Wikivoyage content, you must do the above, and additionally:

  • Release your modifications under a similar free license. It doesn't have to be the exact same license, but it does need to be compatible.

How to copy our data

The best way to get a full copy of our data is from the database dumps. These contain complete copies of all travel guides, and there are many MediaWiki tools out there to help you work with them.

If you only want a few pages from the site, you can use the MediaWiki API for programmatic access to the site. This is available at http://code.wikivoyage.org/w/api.php, where code is one of the language versions of Wikivoyage, e.g., "en" for English. When using the API, be careful you don't overload the site. A good guide is no more than one page every 30 seconds, however, you can find the complete conditions in our terms of use.

Of course, if you just want to print out the page and give it away, you can just use the print function provided on the left, that includes the appropriate attribution links and licences notices.

About our licence

We've chosen the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 for the text on our site, because it allows our guides to be freely used and modified. Whether for the traditional travel guide style, or for new and creative applications.

The licence says:

  1. You give attribution to the authors of the article.
  2. You make any derivative works available under the same licence. This also applies to subsequent derivative works.
  3. You notify readers and other users of the licence.

See also: Wikivoyage:Copyleft.

Sample attribution

You can give attribution to the authors by pointing readers back to the original article, ideally mentioning that the authors' names can be found in the history page for that article.

Text

As an example, to attribute and point back to the edit history of our Singapore article, you could use:

A list of contributors is available at the original Singapore article at Wikivoyage.

This also has the advantage that if people notice errors or improvements that can be made, they can fix the original article and keep the guide up-to-date for all!

Images

For images, the attribution can be found on the corresponding Image: page. Most of the images that we use come from Wikimedia Commons, which has a very useful guide to reusing their images.

Text

You must provide a link to the Attribution-ShareAlike licence to notify readers and users of their rights to the article text or image. The link to the licence should be sufficient. For example:

Content on this page is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 licence.

Images

Again, consult the guide on Wikimedia Commons for licence information for images that may vary by image. However, a very significant majority of images that are used on Wikivoyage are available under the same licence as the text. You can simplify your attribution by only reusing those images made available under that licence. Then you just need to one licence attribution, and you probably will only miss a handful of images used under different licences.

Disclaimer

The above information is our interpretation of the licences by our community. The ultimate conditions for reuse are the ones contained in the full text of the licence.

See also