[OSM-talk] Wikipedia POI import?

Jonathan Bennett openstreetmap at jonno.cix.co.uk
Wed May 6 00:14:56 BST 2009


Russ Nelson wrote:
> Any reason not to go through Wikipedia and import everything with a  
> coordinate as a POI, with a url=http://wikipedia.org/NAME link, and  
> name=NAME where NAME is the name of the Wikipedia entry?  If I do this  
> under a special username, then there is no problem backing out the  
> import if somebody has a better idea later.
>   
Plenty of reason. To give just one example I came up with after no 
thought at all:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watts_Gallery is already in OSM as 
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/30361827 so you'd be 
duplicating a POI -- OSM's location for this point is also more accurate 
than WP's (although I may now edit the WP coords).

I could probably come up with a few dozen more examples just in my local 
mapping area, where the same problems would occur. Scale this up to a 
worldwide level and you'd just be creating thousands and thousands of 
duplicate points.

Jono




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