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Policy:Terms of Use for Wikimedia Maps

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Screenshot of a dynamic map on English Wikivoyage displaying San Francisco's Financial District

General terms

The Wikimedia Foundation hosts the infrastructure for the Wikimedia Maps service with the primary purpose of providing maps on the Wikimedia projects, like Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons. The Wikimedia Maps service is provided openly to the public free of charge. However, we cannot represent or guarantee the truthfulness, accuracy, or reliability of any of the information in maps.

Please review the Wikimedia Terms of Use and Privacy Policy. These policies apply to the Wikimedia Maps services, as well as the other Wikimedia projects. If there are any inconsistencies between those policies and this page, the terms on this page will apply.

Using maps in third-party services

Wikimedia Maps may not be used by third-party services outside of the Wikimedia projects. We may make limited allowances for services that support the Wikimedia projects, such as community tools hosted on Wikimedia Cloud Services.

We reserve the right to discontinue or change our service, block or limit certain users or applications, or take other measures in cases at our sole discretion at any time without notice.

If you use the Wikimedia Maps service for your third-party project, please respect our limited services and resources. If you use the service too heavily, it could affect the service's stability for others or degrade our quality of service.

If you are developing an application that uses the Wikimedia Maps service, you must provide a valid HTTP User-Agent that includes your application, version, and sufficient information to easily contact you (e.g., your email address).

The following are prohibited on the Wikimedia Maps service:

  1. Use for anything other than supporting the Wikimedia projects (for example, you may build a tool for Wikipedia editors, but you may not use it for an unrelated app or business)
  2. Excessive downloading (such as downloading significant areas of tiles for later offline usage)
  3. Accessing the service without a proper HTTP User-Agent or HTTP referer
  4. Using the service without compliance with any license or copyright terms

If you use the Wikimedia Maps service in your third-party project or the Wikimedia projects, you are responsible for complying with the OpenStreetMap copyright policy and any other terms.

On Wikimedia projects

  • Static images of maps: Static maps may be embedded as part of an article page -- they are simply an image without zoom/pan controls or any other interactivity. Static images of maps can be used under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 license, with attribution to this section of the page.
  • Dynamic Maps: Dynamic maps are interactive views of maps. For example, they may be displayed after you click on a static image of a map embedded in an article, or on the maps link in Commons (in the camera location section) such as this example image and associated map. You should keep the credit section in the lower right corner of dynamic maps.

Disclaimers

While we aim to provide a useful service for the Wikimedia community and beyond, no software is perfect.

Wikimedia Maps service may undergo future development, so all your use is at your sole risk. We provide Wikimedia Maps on an "as is" and "as available" basis, and we expressly disclaim all warranties of all kinds, including implied warranties of fitness for a particular purpose, merchantability, and non-infringement. We make no warranty that Wikimedia Maps will meet your requirements, be safe, secure, or uninterrupted.

Updates

Things naturally change over time. To ensure this policy accurately reflects our practices and the law, we reserve the right to modify it.

We will provide reasonable notice of updates to this page by sending announcements to <wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org> (more info) and <maps-l@lists.wikimedia.org> (more info) at least 14 days before changes are made. Please review the most recent version of this policy. You accept the new version of this policy if you use the site after we announce an update. We will save a copy of the previous versions of this policy.

Where does the map data come from?

The maps shown on Wikipedia, Wikivoyage and other Wikimedia projects use data from OpenStreetMap. OpenStreetMap is open data, created by OpenStreetMap contributors, and available under the Open Data Commons Open Database License (ODbL).

The map designs are based on the style OSM Bright for Mapbox Studio, available under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 license.

You may provide attribution to static map images by linking to this page to provide more details on the license, and by complying with the OpenStreetMap copyright policy.

How do I fix an error on the map?

Do you see something on the map that needs editing? Log into OpenStreetMap to fix it and help make the map better for everyone! :)

How to guides and more information

Update log

These Maps Terms of Use went into effect on April 5, 2021. Updates: