Content Partnerships Hub/Helpdesk/Content Upload/Soil maps in South Asia

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Soil maps in South Asia

Description

The FAO/UNESCO Soil Map of the World is a large-scale dataset describing global soil distribution, originally produced by the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations and UNESCO. This foundational dataset has long served as a reference for soil and land classification worldwide.

And thanks to the efforts of community members, the "Soil maps in South Asia" have now been made openly available for use in Wikimedia projects.

Request

The Helpdesk was contacted by User:Shyamal. The request concerned verifying that the dataset could be used within Wikimedia Commons and other Wikimedia projects under compatible licensing terms, and exploring possible applications of the data in the context of regional soil mapping.

Process

In March 2024, Shyamal initiated a formal permission process with the FAO Copyright Office and UNESCO, supported by the Wikimedia Commons permissions team. The correspondence confirmed that the derivative map created by Shyamal (File:South_Asia_Soil.svg, at the beginning of this page) could be released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0).

FAO and UNESCO explicitly authorized this release, acknowledging that the original data remain under their copyright while derivative works may be freely used, modified, and shared under the chosen license. The confirmation was handled through ticket #2024032210005242 by Wikimedia Commons volunteers.

Next steps

The discussion highlighted the opportunity to use the same FAO/UNESCO datasets for additional Wikimedia projects, particularly to visualize soil data for other regions.

Future steps include verifying the compatibility of newer datasets with Wikimedia licenses, assessing their granularity and usefulness for regional applications, and coordinating with volunteers such as Butch Bustria to explore technical implementation strategies.

Furthermore, this type of work opens up the discussion on the ways in which georeferenced information can be used and integrated into Wikimedia projects.

Is using image files (PNG or SVG) the best option? Is it necessary to have a higher level of interactivity with georeferenced content? Are there currently tools available to easily upload this content to Wikimedia projects (Wikidata:Map data and Commons:Map resources)?

Currently, there are templates such as “Maplink”, but they use OpenStreetMaps as a basis, and there is only the option of importing shapefiles in JSON format to Commons (Help:Map data), like this one.

Get involved

Volunteers with experience in GIS, environmental data, or Wikimedia Commons are encouraged to participate by identifying new open soil datasets, producing derivative visualizations, or improving metadata consistency in Wikimedia projects.

If you would like to support this ongoing work, please contact the Helpdesk team.

Requestor

The request was submitted by User:Shyamal, with support from the Wikimedia Commons Permissions team and Wikimedia Sverige.

See also