Licensing and attribution
What this site is made of, who owns each part of it, and what each licence requires of us. Stated plainly so it can be checked against the sources.
In one paragraph
MONOGRAPH is a reference work assembled from public open datasets — Wikidata, Wikipedia, MusicBrainz — plus original content computed or written by the operator of this site, plus videos embedded from YouTube. The open datasets are used within the terms of their licences. Where a licence requires attribution, the attribution is rendered on the page that displays the content, next to it. Where a licence imposes share-alike terms, those terms are honoured for the adapted material and are not claimed over anything else. Nothing on this site is reproduced from a source that has not granted a licence permitting it.
Every ingested source, and its licence
| Source | Licence | Attribution required | Share- alike | Licence text |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Wikidata Wikimedia Foundation |
CC0 1.0 Universal (Public Domain Dedication) | no | no | CC0-1.0 |
| Wikimedia Commons Wikimedia Foundation |
Per file: Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY), Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA), CC0, or Public Domain | yes | yes | CC BY 4.0, CC BY 3.0, CC BY 2.0, CC BY-SA 4.0, CC BY-SA 3.0, CC0 1.0, Public domain, Commons licensing overview |
| Wikipedia (English) Wikimedia Foundation |
Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International (CC BY-SA 4.0); a small number of legacy pages remain under GFDL | yes | yes | CC BY-SA 4.0, Wikipedia:Copyrights, GNU Free Documentation License |
| MusicBrainz MetaBrainz Foundation |
CC0 1.0 Universal (Public Domain Dedication) for core data | no | no | CC0 1.0 — core data, MusicBrainz data licence page |
| MONOGRAPH original content MONOGRAPH (the operator of this site) |
© MONOGRAPH. All rights reserved. | no | no | site policy |
Generated from tools/atlas/pipeline/sources.json — the same registry the
ingestion tools read. Adding a source to that file adds a row here on the next run.
CC0 sources — Wikidata and MusicBrainz core data
Wikidata and the core of MusicBrainz are released under CC0 1.0, a public-domain dedication. CC0 imposes no attribution requirement and no share-alike condition. We credit both sources anyway, and carry the stable identifier of the record used (a Wikidata QID or a MusicBrainz MBID) so that a reader can check the fact and a correction can be made at the point of origin. Crediting a CC0 source is a courtesy, not an obligation — but provenance is the difference between a reference work and a pile of claims.
Wikimedia Commons images — retired 22 September 2026
No Commons file is published on this site any more. Until 22 September 2026 specimen and maker pages were illustrated with photographs from Wikimedia Commons, licensed individually and credited per file under the terms below. The operator removed all of them: a page's visual is now a video embedded from YouTube, and a page with no video shows no picture at all. The paragraphs below are kept as the record of how that material was handled, and because the same licence discipline applies to any image that might ever be published here.
Commons files are licensed individually. Where such a file was used, only files whose machine-readable metadata states a licence that permits both commercial use and derivative works were accepted: Creative Commons Attribution (CC BY), Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike (CC BY-SA), CC0, or a public-domain determination. Files whose licence could not be established, files under non-free or fair-use rationales, and files under licences with non-commercial or no-derivatives terms were excluded from ingestion.
For every Commons image used, the requirements of its licence were met by rendering, on the same page as the image:
- Attribution — the author or credit line exactly as the source file states it, linked to the author's or file's page where one exists.
- The licence — the licence name in full, linked to the licence text, so a reader can read the terms without searching for them.
- A link to the source file — the Commons file page, which carries the original provenance record.
- A modification notice — where we have cropped, resized, or otherwise altered the image, the credit says so.
ShareAlike applies to adaptations of the image itself. A cropped version of a CC BY-SA photograph is itself offered under CC BY-SA, and the credit line says as much. ShareAlike does not reach the surrounding page, the site's own layout, or any other content on the site, and no share-alike obligation is claimed over MONOGRAPH's original material.
YouTube videos — embedded, not copied
Each specimen and maker page may embed a video from YouTube using YouTube's own player. The video is not downloaded, re-uploaded, re-cut or re-hosted: the embed loads from YouTube and stops working if the uploader removes the video. The page names the channel that published it and the date the video carries, and links to the video. The video's own licence — whatever the uploader granted YouTube — is untouched by the embed, and no licence is claimed over the footage.
Wikipedia extracts — CC BY-SA 4.0
Short extracts from Wikipedia (English) are used under CC BY-SA 4.0. Only the introductory extract is taken — a defining sentence or two — never a section body, never a reference list, never an image or infobox.
Because the text is reformatted (wikitext markup removed, wiki-links stripped, converted to the site's house style), what appears here is an adaptation, and it is credited as one. Every extract carries, on the page that shows it: the article title linked to the source article, the revision identifier the text was taken from, and a link to the licence. The adapted extract itself remains available under CC BY-SA 4.0; the rest of the page — the site's own prose, layout, data and comparisons — is not offered under CC BY-SA and does not claim to be.
A small number of Wikipedia pages still carry legacy text under the GFDL; where an extract is drawn from such a page, the GFDL is named in the credit alongside CC BY-SA 4.0.
Original content — © MONOGRAPH
Everything not attributable to the sources above is original. That includes the derived tables (unit conversions, scale-length and fret arithmetic, dimensional comparisons), the cross-references and ordering, the index and search pages, the sitemaps, the feeds, and the editorial writing — including this page.
Original content is computed deterministically from structured data or written by hand; no part of it is generated by a language model at request time, and no specification on this site is invented to fill a gap. Where a figure is derived rather than cited, the raw figure and the method are printed next to the result. See the AI and automation policy for the full account.
Original content is © MONOGRAPH, all rights reserved. You are welcome to quote it with a link and clear attribution; wholesale reproduction is not permitted.
Where attributions appear
Attributions appear on the pages that use the material. A Wikipedia extract or a field taken from Wikidata or MusicBrainz carries its credit in the immediate vicinity of the content — not only in a central not-in-this-page register. An embedded video names its channel and date on the page that embeds it. This page is the summary of the obligation; the page-level credit is the discharge of it.
Where an extract or a video is used in a list or index view, the credit is rendered in that view as well.
No endorsement
Attribution under a Creative Commons licence credits authorship. It does not mean that the author, Wikimedia, the MetaBrainz Foundation, or any contributor endorses MONOGRAPH, its content, or its interpretation of a fact. Separate from that: MONOGRAPH is independent of every manufacturer whose products it lists. See the disclaimer and trademark notice.
If a licence or a credit has been got wrong
If you are a rights holder and believe your work is used here without the licence it requires, or if a credit line is missing, wrong, or attached to the wrong licence, write to rights@myguitarnotes.com. State the page and the item. Content that is contested is removed first and discussed afterwards — we would rather lose a photograph than get a rights question wrong. The full correction and takedown route is on the disclaimer page.
This page describes MONOGRAPH's own practice. It is not legal advice, and it does not create a licence over any content beyond what the named licences already grant.