Licence

This documentation, and the rest of the editorial content created for the World Historical Gazetteer (site pages and images), is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International licence (CC BY 4.0). You may share and adapt it for any purpose, including commercially, provided you give appropriate credit, link to the licence, and indicate if changes were made. The full terms are in the legal code.

Suggested credit: World Historical Gazetteer documentation, https://docs.whgazetteer.org/, CC BY 4.0.

What this licence does not cover

  • Data. WHG asserts no single licence over the data it holds. Every source gazetteer, dataset and collection carries its own licence, which is shown wherever the data appears and travels with it when it leaves the platform. WHG’s own curation and aggregation work (linkage, reconciliation and editorial work on top of those sources) is also CC BY 4.0, asserted alongside each source’s terms and never instead of them. See every licence WHG recognises.

  • Software. WHG’s source code is released under the BSD 3-Clause Licence. Third-party packages keep their own licences; they are listed here.

  • Linked content. Externally hosted material linked from these pages remains under the terms set by its publishers.

Earlier terms

Until 30 September 2026 this content, and WHG’s curation and aggregation work, were licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International (CC BY-NC 4.0). Copies obtained under those terms keep them; everything published from that date is CC BY 4.0.