Skip to the page
Puzzles, Charts & Dilemmas

Copying Our Figures: Licenses, Credits and Data

Updated

Much of what appears on Puzzles, Charts & Dilemmas can be copied, adapted and republished, including for commercial use, as long as it is credited. What you may do depends on who made the item. This page sets out each case.

Original figures, tables and check outputs

Diagrams and charts drawn for this site, the CSV tables behind them, and the CSV or JSON files that hold puzzle checks are released under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license (CC BY 4.0, https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Each original figure has a credit line under it that you can copy as it stands:

"{Figure title}" by Puzzles, Charts & Dilemmas, {https://puzzleschartsanddilemmas.com/{category}/{slug}/}, licensed under CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/).

Replace {Figure title} with the title in the figure's caption, and the bracketed address with the full address of the page the figure appears on, without the braces. If you change the figure, say so after the credit.

A link back to the page is the easiest way to credit the figure, and it is welcome. The license asks for credit, and a missing link is not treated as a breach when the credit itself is there.

This credit line is used only for figures that are entirely the site's own work. A figure that includes someone else's image is credited as described under third-party material below.

Every downloadable data file has a small companion file with the same name and the ending .info.json. It records the file's title, its license, the page it belongs to and the data it was compiled from.

Illustrations

Drawn scenes are labeled Illustration. Each carries this credit, which also states the terms for reuse:

“Illustration: Puzzles, Charts & Dilemmas. Generated schematic illustration — not a photograph or historical record. Reuse: CC BY 4.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), to the extent Puzzles, Charts & Dilemmas holds rights in it.”

Third-party material

Some images come from other collections. They keep their own licenses, and each one carries a full credit under it: the work's title, its creator, the page it came from, its license with a link to the license, and any changes made here, such as cropping. You may reuse these images under their own terms, not under the site's CC BY license.

The third-party images used here are of three kinds:

  • CC0 images. The rights holder has waived all rights, so no credit is required; the source is still given.
  • Prints and portraits from collections under CC BY 4.0. Credit the creator named in the caption, the source page and the license.
  • Public-domain engravings, portraits, photographs and manuscript illustrations. The caption states why each one is public domain, for example the author's death year and the rule that applies. Public-domain status is checked one image at a time.

When a figure places one of the site's diagrams beside a third-party image, each part keeps its own credit. When a figure is built on top of a third-party image, the whole figure follows the license of that image. A figure built on CC BY-SA material keeps a ShareAlike license compatible with the original's version and says what was changed.

Material licensed for non-commercial use only, or with no derivatives allowed, is not used here.

Data from other sources

Charts are redrawn from public data. The data files credit their sources as each source asks:

  • Berkeley graduate admissions counts and Anscombe's quartet. These numbers come from the data files distributed with R, in the R datasets package (objects UCBAdmissions and anscombe), and the files say they are the numbers as distributed with R. The R distribution is licensed under GPL-2 or GPL-3; the counts and values are facts, and the site's table layout is CC BY 4.0. The original publications are cited as R cites them: Bickel, Hammel and O'Connell (1975) in Science for the admissions data, and F. J. Anscombe (1973) for the quartet. For the quartet, the R documentation gives its source as E. R. Tufte, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information (1990), pp. 13–14.
  • NASA Earth Fact Sheet. Physical values for Earth, such as its mean radius and surface gravity, come from the fact sheet published by NASA's Space Science Data Coordinated Archive. Their use here does not imply endorsement by NASA.
  • Florence Nightingale (1858) and Charles Joseph Minard (1869). Figures transcribed from Nightingale's mortality tables and from the numbers printed on Minard's map are public domain: Nightingale died in 1910 and Minard in 1870. Each data file names the page or sheet the numbers were read from. Tables that quote older public-domain texts, such as the 1914 English translation of Galileo's Two New Sciences, name the edition and page.
  • Results reported in books, papers and reference works. A few tables restate published results as facts, each with its page or section: group choices from Frohlich and Oppenheimer's Choosing Justice (1992), travel times from Klotz's 2013 preprint on arXiv, and position summaries from Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entries. No text or table layout is copied.
  • PhilPapers 2020 survey. The published results (Bourget and Chalmers, 2023, in Philosophers' Imprint) are licensed for non-commercial use only. The site cites a single result in the text with a link to the paper and does not reproduce or tabulate the survey.

Fonts

The site's typefaces are Schibsted Grotesk, Charis SIL and Iosevka, all released under the SIL Open Font License 1.1 (https://openfontlicense.org/). They are served from this site.

Citing a page

Every entry ends with a “Cite this page” block. It names Puzzles, Charts & Dilemmas as the author and gives the entry's title, its publication date, the date of its last substantive revision and its address; add the date you read it. The site does not issue DOIs, so please do not cite one.

Questions about reuse can go to contact@puzzleschartsanddilemmas.com.