Portal talk:Coronavirus disease 2019

COVID-19: Link posted at meta

Just to let you know a link to this page was posted at m:Coronation#Sister_projects. Please join us at m:Talk:Coronation#Hello. Cheers, Ottawahitech (talk) 00:20, 2 April 2020 (UTC)

European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC)

The ECDC has a lot of material relating to COVID. Is there anyone here who would be interested in tackling moving some ot this material to wikisource? Ottawahitech (talk) 22:03, 23 December 2020 (UTC)

@Ottawahitech: The ECDC claims copyright on items on their website. Do you know of some exceptions? Inductiveload—talk/contribs 11:01, 24 December 2020 (UTC)

@Inductiveload: Thanks for pinging me, and apologies for my tardy response.

No I have no affiliation whatsoever with ECDC. I have used the site extensively for collecting information regarding the number of cases/deaths etc., and have noticed that when I missed a day the stuff was gone. Since they have a lot of information on Covid, I thought they may want to share at least some of it with the public (in a responsible way). That's why I asked. Ottawahitech (talk) 02:50, 4 January 2021 (UTC)

@Ottawahitech: You can approach them and ask if there's any media they'd like to release under a suitable license. The key thing is that they must license it under a "free" license that means that anyone can re-use or modify it for any purpose, including selling it or appending "this message approved by Hitler's ghost" to it, stapling it to your forehead and setting it and yourself on fire as livestreamed performance art. Requiring attribution is OK, as is requiring re-distribution under the same license. For example, CC-BY-SA (require attribution and sharing under the same license) is OK, but CC-BY-NC (require attribution but disallows commercial use) is not. If they do agree to release under a suitable license, they should send the confirmation of that in writing to the Wikimedia OTRS system so there's a record of it.

The US federal government is fairly unique in the world in that all their output is always public domain and in English. The Chinese and German government are similar but third-party translations might not be. So if you really wanted some documentation about COVID, the US government is probably a good place to start. The UN also often has PD output, but not the WHO (I imagine, without any actual evidence, that this is because they feel there is value if keeping control of the material to avoid misrepresentation of their health messaging). Inductiveload—talk/contribs 10:44, 4 January 2021 (UTC)