Sources

The Encyclopedia realm is English Wikipedia: card titles, descriptions, extracts, and the full article body behind “read more”.

The text is used under CC BY-SA 4.0. That carries two separate obligations:

• Attribution. Every card links to its article, and the article's history page credits everyone who wrote it. That is the form the Wikimedia Terms of Use accept.
• A licence notice. Naming the licence is not sufficient; the notice has to reach the licence text. So the licence is named and linked on the card itself, not only in a footer.

Non-free images are excluded by construction. Wikipedia hosts some files under fair use, which are not CC BY-SA, so Drift requests freely licensed images only and the article parser drops embedded images entirely.

Worth stating separately, because it is easy to get wrong and Drift got it wrong until July 2026. A photograph on a Wikipedia article is a separate work from the article. It has its own author, who is usually not among the article's authors, and its own licence, which may be CC BY-SA, CC BY, CC0, a public domain dedication or something else. The article's licence does not cover it.

So Drift reads each file's own creator and licence from Wikipedia and shows them on the card, with a link to that file's description page. If a file's licence requires a credit and Drift cannot establish one, or if the file is flagged as carrying trademark or personality rights, the image is not displayed at all. A card without a picture is the correct outcome there.

The Gallery realm is The Metropolitan Museum of Art's Open Access collection, under CC0 1.0. The museum waives its rights to that material and permits use for any purpose, including commercially, without asking permission. Drift serves only works the museum itself marks as public domain, with the artist, date, medium and dimensions from its catalogue.

It then applies a second, stricter test of its own. The museum's public-domain flag is an American determination, and American copyright expires sooner than European copyright does. Drift is run from the Netherlands, so a work is shown only if every artist credited on it died at least 71 years ago, or, where no artist is recorded, the work was finished before 1830. That is narrower than the museum's own standard, and deliberately so.

Artwork images are served through Drift rather than linked from the museum, so that they can be sized to the page. They are the museum's own photographs, unaltered apart from being resized.

Drift also keeps a copy of part of the museum's published catalogue: the titles, subject keywords, artists and departments of its open-access works. The museum releases that catalogue under CC0 1.0as well. It is what lets Drift tell you when an article has a matching artwork without asking the museum on every card you read.

Drift can wander the articles behind the month's stories without using a news source. Wikipedia's editors maintain a current events portal, one page per day, made of links to encyclopedia articles.

Drift reads only the link targets: which articles are being pointed at, how often, and in which section. No headline or reporting is fetched, stored or shown. So “in the news” is the same CC BY-SA encyclopedia as the rest of the app, selected differently. There is a longer note on why it works that way.

Drift cuts an article into a card, works out which related pages to offer as threads, labels each thread as nearby or a tangent, and orders batches for variety so you do not get five near-identical pages in a row.

It does not write the facts. No sentence on a card is generated. Where a language model is involved it runs locally, is optional, and is limited to labelling and ordering material a person already wrote; switch it off and the app behaves the same. That rule is on the principles page.

If something on a card is wrong, it is most likely wrong at the source, and the better fix is to correct it there. Wikipedia can be edited by anyone, and a fix there reaches everyone rather than just Drift. Every card links to its article.

If Drift itself is at fault, for example misattributing something, mislabelling a thread, or showing an image it should not, let me know.

Drift is an independent project. It is not affiliated with, endorsed by or sponsored by the Wikimedia Foundation or The Metropolitan Museum of Art. It uses their names only to say where the content came from.