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Will it be moral to copy all city pages information for all cities in my country from Wikipedia? I need those for my website. How can I do it?

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Wikipedia uses the Creative Commons 3.0 Share and Share Alike license which means that you can copy the content but it requires proper attribution.

You can read more information on their Terms of Use page. (I won't quote it in detail as it could change). The key points are that:

  • You must have attribution of where it came from.
  • You must pass on the same rights to others who might want to copy your content.
  • You must indicate where your text differs from theirs.
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  • In the content of my pages I'll be referring to the content as "Wikipedia info...". Attribution is not at all any issue. But how do I find all those pages for each city? Say for New York. I'm thinking to write a perl script to do it. But I've heard that Wikipedia is smart enough to filter "artificial" page requests say from my bot.
    – user10151
    Apr 12, 2011 at 12:21
  • @John - see this question on Stack Overflow. It's a couple of years old but should be still relevant.
    – ChrisF
    Apr 12, 2011 at 12:26
  • atleast data extraction part may of my interest. But now sure how I can use it to extract details for a city like New York from Wikipedia New York main page.
    – user10151
    Apr 12, 2011 at 12:48
  • The "how" part of the question would be more appropriate on Stack Overflow. Apr 12, 2011 at 14:07
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Wikipedia offers free copies of all available content to interested users. These databases can be used for mirroring, personal use, informal backups, or database queries (such as for Wikipedia:Maintenance). All text content is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License (GFDL).

If you need only English content, you can fetch the English Wikipedia MySQL dump.

You can also access any article programmatically, one at a time in XML or as an RSS Feed.

You can scrape specific portions of a Wikipedia article using YQL & jQuery

You can even collect multiple Wikipedia pages in a basket and convert them all to a single PDF document (just like an ebook) with just a few mouse clicks and offer this is a download.

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