[Talk-GB] Addition of Wikipedia links in German!

[Brian Quinion]

On 21 October 2012 16:08, Robert Norris <rw_norris at hotmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> to add a tags such as "wikipedia = de:Portsmouth"
>
> One can't help but wonder what the point of such tags are (an indeed
> website), as any intelligent web search based on the name of the object
> (and +wikipedia) and maybe UK or the county will usually takes to one the
> web site (or wikipedia) of that item and probably in the right language
> too...
>

>From a pragmatic point of view these wikipedia links make a
significant improvement to the quality of search in openstreetmap since
nominatim uses them to help calculate the importance of a feature (e.g. is
York, gb or York, PA. USA bigger, which one should we show first... - this
is how we calculate that information, remove this and that goes away).

This same duplication of names for different places makes calculating the
osm to wikipedia linking automatically extremely problematic.  Having this
information explicitly in the database is a lot simpler and more reliable.
 The 'usually' in the above sentence is the problem!

Also, once any wikipedia link is found wikipedia themselves provide tables
to allow you to find the same article in any other language - so any
wikipedia link will do.


> This sort of automatic search linking would be much web 2.0, than the pile
> of URL related values in the DB.
>
>
Wikipedia links have become a sort of interlingua for linking different
data sets - if 2 data sets both have links to wikipedia they can themselves
be linked.  Because if its open nature lots of datasets link to wikipedia
so the impact of having wikipedia tags within our dataset is significantly
larger than adding any other external id would have.

--
 Brian
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