[OSM-talk] Wikipedia POI import?

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Wed, May 6, 2009 at 11:11 AM, Jonathan Bennett
<openstreetmap at jonno.cix.co.uk> wrote:
> Jacek Konieczny wrote:
>> You don't need multiple values. Other languages are linked in Wikipedia,
>> no need to duplicate this in OSM.
>>
>> If a place is described in 20 national Wikipedias do we really want 20
>> wikipedia=XX:<name> tags in OSM when only single wikipedia=XX:<name>
>> links to all the pages?
>
> If you want to be able to render maps for a specific language or
> territory, yes. Having the WP shortcut version means that if I wanted to
> link to the English version of a WP page when we have only the Polish
> version, I have to retrieve the Polish page from WP and parse it to find
> the link to the English version. This means I can't do this rendering
> offline, and would slow the job down somewhat.

You can get a dump of Wikipedia and process that offline (just as you
got a dump of OSM).

There's also a current effort to get interwiki links into MediaWiki's
database[1]. This allows for database dumps of the interwiki table[2]
meaning you wouldn't have to maintain your own parser for grabbing
these links.

The current implementation of interwiki links in MediaWIki is the
biggest cause of spam in article histories, it's not uncommon to have
a small article with one "real" edit and 20-30 automated edits that
amend the interwiki links. If we were going to list all of Wikipedia's
interwiki links for applicable POIs in OSM that would eventually mean
that we'd need our own interwiki bots connected to Wikipedia.

That would suck.

1. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/WMDE_contract_offers/Store_interwiki-links_in_the_database
2. http://download.wikimedia.org/