Talk:Maps of the UK and Ireland

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Ireland Portal
This article is within the scope of WikiProject Ireland, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to Ireland on Wikipedia. For more information, or to get involved, visit the project page.
List This article has been rated as List-Class on the Project's quality scale.
(If you rated the article please give a short summary at comments to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses.)
Low This article has been rated as Low-importance on the priority scale.
Northern Ireland This article is within the scope of WikiProject Northern Ireland, an attempt to build a comprehensive and detailed guide to Northern Ireland on Wikipedia. If you would like to participate, you can edit the article attached to this page, or visit the project page, where you can join the project and/or contribute to the discussion.
List This article has been rated as List-Class on the assessment scale.
(If you rated the article please give a short summary at comments to explain the ratings and/or to identify the strengths and weaknesses of the article.)
WikiProject Northern Ireland tasks:

Contents

[edit] Copyright Clarification for 'Visions of Britain'

I sent the following email to the contact address found in the website. I'll make the changes when the time comes. --Duncan nz 15:03, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Subject: 'Visions of Britain' copyright Date: Fri, 13 Apr 2007 16:59:50 +0200


Dear Mr Southall,

I've just been doing some editorial work on the online encyclopedia Wikipedia [1] on the page about online maps of Britain [2]. I've been adding where I can some information about the copyright associated with the different sites. This is important for people like me who are researching our family genealogies for online and print distribution.

The copyright of Visions of Britain is unclear to me. While the copyright page [3] names several copyright holders, it doesn't mention the type of restrictions/ freedoms associated with each copyright. For example there are several government agencies listed - I assume then that their work is under crown copyright - which grants rights for some non-commercial use.

Perhaps you can help me clear this up and perhaps I can in return I could help you draft a new text for the page? I cannot add anything to the Wikipedia entry until it is published in the website.

Regards, Duncan

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org [2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maps_of_the_UK_and_Ireland [3] http://www.visionofbritain.org.uk/footer/doc_text_for_title.jsp?topic=credits&seq=4 --Duncan nz 15:03, 13 April 2007 (UTC)

Dear Duncan,

Firstly, your references to our site within Wikipedia are significant sources of visitors to our site, for which many thanks.

I am aware that the copyright notices on Vision of Britain need to be revised. In fact, there are rather clearer notices that appear in connection with specific parts of the statistical data, but not for example with the mapping.

The general point is that the Vision of Britain interface itself limits you to quite small excerpts from maps, and we are happy for people to use a couple of those excerpts in things they are writing without specific permission from us, provided what they are writing is not being published commercially. If it is being published, but not commercially, we would want to see a clear acknowledgment of the source. It is maybe worth quoting what appears when you look at the "source information" for our statistics:

The Vision of Britain site exists to help people doing personal research projects on particular areas within Britain. So long as you are using our data for only a small number of units, you are not making money out of what you are doing, and you are not systematically re-publishing our data, you do not need to request permission from us.

By "unit" this means administrative areas, which might mean a single parish or "Great Britain", so this is not directly relevant to our historical maps -- but the general principle applies. We were funded by the national lottery to provide a facility for "life long learners", and people obviously need to be able to include material from the site in the essays and reports they write.

What I need to be clear about is that the historical maps ARE copyright material, and bulk extraction and re-publishing is not OK. Bulk extraction might mean very tediously extracting lots of map fragments via our ordinary pages, and pasting them together. That is unlikely, but someone could write a program to do the job for them.

Bulk extraction could also be done using our Web Map Server, which allows you to systematically use maps from our site within your own web pages, as base maps. I am interested in developing use by other not-for-profit web sites, so long as they are clear we cannot guarantee a reliable service. However, anyone doing this certainly needs to get in touch with us. NB using our WMS as we intend is NOT about holding your own copies of the maps, but using ours with your own content. I could say a good deal more, but you might want to look at the Open Geospatial Consortium web site first:

www.opengeospatial.org

Best wishes,

Humphrey Southall —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Duncan nz (talk • contribs) 03:49, 3 May 2007 (UTC).

[edit] Maps to be uploaded

The following "Maps to be uploaded" section was added to the article, but I think it was actually intended to be a list of work required: --A bit iffy 12:36, 16 June 2006 (UTC)

Public domain:

Non-profit use only (ask for permission to GFDL?):

[edit] Unencyclopedic

This is unencyclopedic because it is largely just a list of services. From WP:NOT#link:

“ Wikipedia articles are not:
  1. Mere collections of external links or Internet directories. There is nothing wrong with adding one or more useful content-relevant links to an article; however, excessive lists can dwarf articles and detract from the purpose of Wikipedia. On articles about topics with many fansites, including a link to one major fansite may be appropriate. See Wikipedia:External links for some guidelines.


 ”

This is simply a collection of links with a small amount of info about each link. --Thinboy00 @205, i.e. 03:55, 21 December 2007 (UTC)

[edit] Content

I'd like to see this improved rather than deleted as unencyclopedic, since it is a valuable source of reference. My first question: what exactly is its scope? It really only seems to be about electronic maps available online, not for example OS digital data, current and historic paper mapping, etc. Wikpedia does not seem have to any sort of detail on the histories of the numerous OS map series. Should it be expanded to include these, or retitled for example "Online maps of the UK and Ireland"? Pterre (talk) 16:20, 3 April 2008 (UTC)