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Wikipedia:Copyright problems/2021 February 18

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  • Press Freedom Index (history · last edit · rewrite) from https://rsf.org/en/ranking/2020 and prior ranking tables from the website. Since they use their own criteria as to how to arrive at the rankings, the resulting list is copyright. For this type of list we usually only show the top ten, or perhaps for a list of this type we might show the top ten for each year or even a few from the top ten and bottom ten for each year. I have listed the article here so that interested editors will have time to modify the article.— Diannaa (talk) 13:40, 18 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • This is not a copyright violation, at least not between the Wikipedia article and the URL you've given. The data content of tables cannot be copyrighted. What is copyrightable is the particular style of presenting the data. The fact that RSF used its criteria to arrive at the rankings does not give it any copyright on the numbers that it calculated. The URL you've given, as an html file, shows nothing. If some of the javascript is enabled in addition to the html itself, then the 2020 rankings are listed in what to me looks like a completely different format to that in the Wikipedia article. You should revert your edit. Boud (talk) 23:22, 18 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
      • The people who create the index select unique criteria to do so. Creativity has gone into producing the list by selecting which facts are included in the resulting rankings. It goes far beyond a numerical listing of facts, and therefore enjoys copyright protection in my opinion.— Diannaa (talk) 23:46, 18 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
        • The creativity used in creating the index is completely irrelevant to copyright. Copyright is about the particular style of presenting information. Creativity by the people preparing the sources underlies almost all the information presented in Wikipedia. Newspapers are assumed to do fact-checking: that's not just straight-forward bureaucracy, it requires thinking, creativity and work. Copyright is about the resulting text, not about the work that goes into producing it.
          To consider this as a copyright violation would imply that the WMF should quickly delete the whole of the Wikidata project before someone notices that it exists. I strongly recommend that you revert the copyright notice. Boud (talk) 19:47, 19 February 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    These rankings are factual information and their inclusion does not, in my opinion, violate copyright. ~ El D. (talk to me) 00:32, 27 March 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • Greetings. I am from Ukrainian Wikipedia and I have been editing international rankings-related articles in Ukrainian Wikipedia for a while. I wonder if the administrators came to any conclusion about this case since Wikipedia has a lot of articles with a full list of countries (example: Global Peace Index, Good Country Index, Democracy Index and so on) and somehow administrators never found any copyrighting there before. Removal of the table by Diannaa without discussion is strange to me, considering the fact that Wikipedias are full of such articles with full list of countries and then they should be removed too. Hope to hear any updates about this case.—Ivgemytlig (talk) 08:44, 8 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    • I'm not necessarily convinced that this is a copyvio, but I've removed the table and converted it into a Top 10 list as suggested. – Thjarkur (talk) 16:21, 10 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]
    Article cleaned by investigator or others. No remaining infringement. — Diannaa (talk) 01:36, 12 April 2021 (UTC)[reply]