[OSM-talk] Adding Wikidata tags to 70k items automatically

[Eugene Alvin Villar]

On Mon, Sep 1, 2014 at 5:22 AM, Lester Caine <lester at lsces.co.uk> wrote:

> But where do you stop. Wikipedia and wikidata are not the only sources
> so if they get 'special treatment' then why not some of the other
> similar archives? Now if every other archive simply included an OSM tag
> ... problem solved. But why should we get special treatment the other
> way around? We just need a reliable way of identifying POI's that we can
> all agree on and then lookup all data with filtering relevant to the
> intended use.
>

1. We already link to Wikipedia using the wikipedia=* tag. I really can't
see how wikidata=* is any different. Linking to Wikidata actually provides
more value than merely linking to Wikipedia as it provides additional data,
*including* links to all language Wikipedias where the object has an
article.

2. Wikidata is certainly special. There is no other freely-licensed and
general-purpose database project out there that is maintained by an open
community. Freebase comes close but it is owned and operated by Google.

3. You fear that linking to Wikidata opens up the floodgates for linking
from OSM to other databases (such as national registries and the like). But
actually, it makes much more sense to link from Wikidata, being a database
about data, to those other databases instead of from OSM. In fact, Wikidata
already has many of properties (like keys in OSM) that provide links to
other databases[1][2]. We can leverage that in OSM by linking to Wikidata.

[1]
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:List_of_properties/Generic#Authority_control
[2]
https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:List_of_properties/Geographical_feature#Administrative_territorial_entity_identifier
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