a long oneFree to use

Every map, price, coordinate and recipe on this site comes from somewhere a reader can go and check. This page names each archive, dataset, directory and licence, says what it is good for, says what it will not tell you, and names the ones this project could not get into. Licences are quoted from the publisher's own terms. Dates are the dates I read them, which for all of these is 16 September 2026.

Licence: the Open Data Commons Open Database License, ODbL 1.0. The project's own terms require two things of a reuser — credit OpenStreetMap by displaying its attribution notice, and make clear that the data is available under the Open Database License — and add the share-alike condition: alter or build on the data and you may distribute the result only under the same licence.

Good for: a bar's coordinates, its street address, sometimes its opening days, sometimes its cuisine tag. It is the source behind the pins on this site's maps.

Will not tell you: whether a place is any good, whether it is still trading, or whether the hours are current. The data is edited by volunteers, a closed shop can sit on the map for years, and a shop that never got mapped is simply absent. An absence in OpenStreetMap is not evidence a place does not exist.

Licence: public domain. Used here for the Admin 1 states-and-provinces layer at 1:50 million, which is what draws the state outlines on the map.

Good for: country and state shapes, coastlines, lakes, at a scale that renders fast and small.

Will not tell you: anything at city scale. At 1:50m a county is a few pixels and a neighbourhood does not exist.

Licence: a work of the United States government, public domain. It carries branded-food label panels — the ingredient list in label order, serving size, sodium, sugars — alongside standard-reference and survey food data.

Good for: reading a bottled sauce the way its own label states it, which is how every sauce profile on this site records ingredient rank, sodium per tablespoon and sugar per tablespoon.

Will not tell you: what is in a house sauce. A bar's recipe is not on a label, and most of the sauces that matter most on this site are made in a kitchen, not a bottling plant.

Licence: US government work, public domain. Two weekly reports do the work here. The Weekly National Chicken Report (AMS_3646) gives wholesale parts prices in cents per pound with ranges, weighted averages and volumes. The Weekly Grocery Store Chicken Feature Activity report (AMS_2756) gives advertised retail prices in dollars per pound with the number of sampled stores behind each one, gathered from store circulars, newspaper ads and retailer websites.

Good for: a price with a date, a method and a sample size — the kind of number that can be quoted without hedging.

Will not tell you: what a flat costs as against a drumette. The wholesale report prices Wings – Whole and stops; the retail report bundles Party Wings, Flats and Drums into one line. It is also a weekly snapshot, not a series: a run of years has to be assembled week by week.

Licence: US government work, public domain, readable in full at the eCFR. 9 CFR 381.170(b) is the section that matters to wings: it defines Wings, Wing drummette and Wing portion, and it is quoted verbatim in two of this site's stories.

Good for: settling what a word means on a package.

Will not tell you: what a word means on a menu. The federal poultry standards govern labels. A restaurant's menu board is not a label, which is the gap that sent the boneless-wing argument to a tort court instead of a regulator.

Licence: varies by file, but Commons accepts only free content — material anyone may use for any purpose, including commercially and in derivative works. Non-commercial-only and no-derivatives licences are refused, and the policy states plainly that Commons does not accept content under the condition of fair use.

Good for: photographs with a licence attached to the file. Two public collections carry most of the American roadside material this site's art pages point at: John Margolies's roadside photographs at the Library of Congress and Carol M. Highsmith's, both public domain, and the Smithsonian American Art Museum's open-access releases under CC0.

Will not tell you: whether you may use the picture for everything. A free licence covers copyright and nothing else — personality rights, trademarks and the rights in whatever the photograph depicts survive it. A photograph of a mural is two works, and the mural's copyright is not the photographer's to license.

Licence: CC BY-SA 4.0. Reusable in full, with attribution, and only under the same licence.

Good for: recipe text this site can print whole rather than reducing to an ingredient list. Public-domain American cookbooks printed before 1930 travel the same way.

Will not tell you: how a particular shop does it. A community recipe is a method, not a provenance, and this site treats it as one.

Licence: none — a trade association's website, free to read, not free to redistribute. It represents producers and processors accounting for about 95% of US chicken production, and it lobbies Congress and the federal agencies.

Good for: the Chicken Wing Report each January, the Super Bowl consumption estimate that every newspaper reprints, and the Harris Poll dip and flavour questions it commissions, which are the only public numbers on ranch against blue cheese at the wing counter.

Will not tell you: how the estimate was made. The releases publish the figure and not the method. They are also an industry's own numbers about its own product, which is not a reason to discard them and is a reason to say whose they are every time.

Licence: none — a destination marketing organisation's webpage, free to read, not an open dataset. It names fourteen stops across Buffalo, Amherst, Getzville, Williamsville, East Aurora, Hamburg and Orchard Park, and sorts them by wing style.

Good for: a named, dated list of which shops the city itself puts forward, which this site records as a recognition rather than a ranking.

Will not tell you: who was left off, or why. A trail is a promotion. Inclusion measures attention paid, and nothing about the wings.

Licence: rights held by the Southern Foodways Alliance, an institute of the Center for the Study of Southern Culture at the University of Mississippi. Interviews — audio and transcripts — are free to read and listen to online. Using the material in research, scholarship, artistic production or publication requires permission from SFA first.

Good for: cooks and owners in their own recorded words, including the Nashville hot chicken kitchens this site's Tennessee records lean on. The interviews are dated and the interviewer is named, which is more provenance than most food writing carries.

Will not tell you: anything you may quote at length without asking. Free to read is not free to reuse, and this site cites these interviews rather than reproducing them.

Licence: a judicial opinion of a US court is a public record and carries no copyright. Berkheimer v. REKM, L.L.C., 2024-Ohio-2787, 177 Ohio St.3d 431, docket 2023-0293, decided 25 July 2024, is the one this site leans on.

Good for: exact words, attributed to the judge who wrote them, in a document that will still be there next year.

Will not tell you: anything, if you cannot fetch it. On 16 September 2026 the Supreme Court of Ohio's own PDF refused this project's connection, and the Justia, CourtListener and FindLaw copies returned 403 or a challenge page. The quotations on that story are therefore taken from reporting that printed them, and are labelled that way.

Named plainly, because a gap that is not named looks like a decision.

Calvin Trillin's An Attempt to Compile a Short History of the Buffalo Chicken Wing, The New Yorker, 25 August 1980. In copyright and behind the magazine's paywall. It is cited throughout as the source of Dominic Bellissimo's midnight telling, and quoted only at the length that reporting about it quotes.

The FSIS Food Standards and Labeling Policy Book, which carries the wyngz policy in the agency's own words. The USDA servers returned 403 to every request on 16 September 2026, so the policy is quoted from Consumer Reports quoting FSIS.

Urner Barry's poultry price series, the one the trade actually uses to price a flat against a drumette. Subscription only.

Circana and NielsenIQ retail scanner data, which would show ranch and blue cheese dollar sales side by side. Subscription only.

Restaurant menus. The Buffalo shops' own prices sit behind ordering platforms that serve nothing to a plain request; Bar-Bill and Duff's both refused on 16 September 2026.

Mural photographs. Buffalo's murals are copyrighted by the artists who painted them, and at least one Buffalo muralist has invoiced businesses for commercial use of images of his wall. This site links to murals and does not reproduce them.