License information

Wikimedia’s mission is to create educational content that is freely available to all people. In keeping with that goal, all information on Wikimedia projects may be freely shared, copied, remixed, and used for any purpose (including commercial purposes!) in perpetuity. To help guide users of dumps.wikimedia.org, this page contains more detailed information about Wikimedia’s licensing and licensing policies as they may apply to our dumps.

This is a high-level guide only. Where this information conflicts with specific information in the Wikimedia Foundation Terms of Use, or with other information contained inside the dumps themselves, this description should be ignored. Those terms are controlling.

Text

Except as discussed below, all original textual content is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL) and the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 3.0 License. Some text may be available only under the Creative Commons license; see our Terms of Use for details. Text written by some authors may be released under additional licenses or into the public domain.

Images

By default, images uploaded to our services are under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 4.0 License. However, many images are NOT released under this license. Image copyright information is contained in the image description page inside the text dumps.

Exceptions

Wikinews

As of 2005-09-25, all Wikinews textual content is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License. All Wikinews material published prior to that date (2005-09-25) is in the public domain.

Wikidata

Copyrights of structured data in the main, Property, Lexeme, and EntitySchema namespaces are waived using the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) public domain dedication. All unstructured content in other namespaces is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share-Alike 3.0 License.

Analytics Datasets

All Analytics datasets are available under the Creative Commons Zero (CC0) public domain dedication, unless otherwise specified.

Fair use and other exceptions

Some text and images may be included when it is believed that this inclusion is permitted by fair use or other exceptions to copyright. A list (possibly incomplete) of relevant exceptions and policies can be found on our meta-wiki. Use of this information may be a copyright violation if used in a different context than they are used on Wikipedia.

Potential infringements

Wikimedians diligently remove copyright infringements, but because that removal is an ongoing process, these dumps may contain some copyright infringements which have not yet been noticed and removed. Your use of this material is AT YOUR OWN RISK. Please let us know about any copyright infringements you find, so they can be removed.

More information: Legal

For more information about our licensing policy, see:

Section 7 of our Terms of Use
Our Licensing Policy
Per-project licensing information, such as this description of English Wikipedia’s licensing policy.

More information: for researchers

If you’re a researcher, you can find more information about our data sources as part of our Research hub.

Apps Guidelines

Guidelines for developers on how to properly reuse Wikimedia data, trademarks, and content.

Questions?

For questions, please contact legal@wikimedia.org.