[OSM-talk] Can wikidata links help fight name inflation?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 05/28/2015 10:50 AM, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
>     The place node for London has 154 name tags as we speak, but there are
>     several thousand languages in use on the planet, so there's still room
>     for enhancement.
> 
> wasn't our credo that what the mappers are interested in will be
> accepted? 

No, that would be stretching the definition of "credo". I think there's
a high level of agreement for "stuff that's on the ground and not of a
too temporary nature" has a place in OSM. Stuff that's not on the ground
- e.g. the name given to a place by a culture thousands of miles away -
can occasionally be allowed but there are limits.

> actually most "real names" are such, name translations or
> transliterations. To give a famous example that most people will know:

Yup, a speaker of English will come home from a Rome visit and say "I
was at the Colosseum". - They will not, to repeat my favourite example,
come home from a visit to Paris and say "I was at the New Bridge."

But let's not get sidetracked, that's a different discussion from the
Wikidata question. I just hope that Wikidata doesn't list "New Brige" as
the "English name" of "Pont Neuf" or else they have a problem ;)

> If we were to massively use wikidata _instead of duplicating some
> details from there also in our db_ we would have to improve wikidata as
> well,

It is my impression that a large proportion of name:xx tags in OSM are
added by "naming specialists" who do little else than large scale name
additions; it would probably not be too much to ask for them to indulge
Wikidata instead of OSM.

> and impose our entity structure on them, or it won't work in some
> cases (and if it doesn't work in some case, it doesn't work at all).

I don't agree. If we could offload 99.99% of all name:xx tags to
Wikidata and keep them only in edge cases like your Scalinata di Trinità
dei Monti, why not? Why would a few cases in which name:xx tags remain
ruin the whole scheme?

> I don't want to discuss whether Berlin is a metropolis or not, what I
> want to point out is that there seem to be different criteria defined
> for different languages:

You're listing some interesting shortcomings of Wikidata that I weren't
aware of. However these would not, in my opinion, bar us from using
Wikidata as a name repository for rendering; if a mapper is of the
opinion that no matching Wikidata object exists for an OSM feature, then
they shouldn't use a wikidata tag, that much is clear!

> I agree that tag lists of hundreds of names in different languages
> aren't very handy to look through,

They're also very hard to verify; and verifiability is important for
OSM. I've seen small villages in England which had a name and a name:ru
tag, and the only occurrence of the name:ru tag on a web search was on
a dubious Russian "weather and events in <random city>" page. When is a
name a name?

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"