[OSM-talk] Nominatim weakness

[Eugene Alvin Villar]

On Tue, Dec 15, 2015 at 10:13 AM, Dave F. <davefox at madasafish.com> wrote:

> On 14/12/2015 08:25, Sarah Hoffmann wrote:
>
>>
>> Some helpful person has put a wikipedia link to the Starbucks
>> wikipedia page on every single Starbucks in Japan. That's what
>> throwing off Nominatim. Having a wikipedia page boosts the importance
>> of an object.
>>
>
> Have you considered that the program is over weighting the importance of a
> wiki page?
>

In most situations, having a Wikipedia page is a roughly good indicator
that a map object is more important. A residential house will almost always
lack its own Wikipedia article, while a museum would probably have one.

And as Sarah mentioned, Nominatim also does some sort of weighting of
Wikipedia articles also. So an OSM object will not necessarily become
overly important just because there's a wikipedia=* tag.


> Do end users want to find a coffee shop local to them or one thousands of
> kilometres away just because it has an extra tag attached?
>

Not just an extra tag, but *wrong* tag. In this particular case, I think
the best fix is to correct the wrong tagging, and not to tweak the
Nominatim algorithm.

Eugene
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