[OSM-talk] Place names with coordinates in Wikipedia + OSM

[Lars Aronsson]

Hi, I'm user:LA2 and have not been very active in OSM in 2008. 
Instead I have been more active in the Swedish language Wikipedia. 
This might change back in 2009.

The Swedish language Wikipedia has many articles about places that 
don't specify any geographic coordinate.  Some other language 
versions of Wikipedia have special task forces or "wikiprojects" 
aiming to add coordinates to articles.

Once coordinates are in the articles, they can be extracted to 
create a list of places names to coordinates, useful for OSM.
Perhaps the reverse can also be made?  Has anyone tried this?

Does OSM have any metric, such as place names per square kilometer 
or place names per 1000 inhabitants, to help me understand if 
there are too few or enough many place names in OSM for Sweden?

Place names should typically be related to population density. But 
do we have any free population density data?

If we are going to create a list of place names with coordinates, 
we could just as well do this for Wikipedia and OSM at the same 
time.  What is the best way?  Perhaps this should be kept and 
maintained as a separate database, that can then be imported into 
OSM and Wikipedia?  If so, is that database Geonames.org?  I see 
there is a [[Geonames errata]] page on the OSM wiki, but it links 
to a non-existing external page.

Besides Geonames, are there NASA/CIA/TIGER data that provide place 
names with coordinates for Northern Europe?  Are they accurate 
enough to be useful, or do we need to improve them?  Is the 
Geonames classification (type of place) good enough for OSM?


-- 
  Lars Aronsson (lars at aronsson.se)
  Aronsson Datateknik - http://aronsson.se