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

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

2015-05-28 11:41 GMT+02:00 Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org>:

> 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 ;)
>


actually they do for Spanish and Catalan: www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q335277
I guess they do have a problem now?
Another issue that can be seen here: nobody will want this "Puente Nuevo
(París)" as a label for a bridge on a map (París)
Funny ah? Every single entity in wikidata I have looked at had some issues
in one or the other way, I believe we would get more problems than we would
solve.



>
> > 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?
>


This all depends in the end on the implementation, but exceptions are
always bad (for the mapper, because he has to be aware of them, and it
raises complexity, for the data consumers because of similar reasons).



>
> > 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 you open up this can of worms for names, there will soon be the desire
to extend the concept




> 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 believe this is a bit naive, if wikidata becomes a first class citizen in
OSM people will try very hard to find something that fits more or less,
they will not accept that there is no such entity in wikidata.



>
> > 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.
>


they are simple to verify when they are in your own language, it's a
problem of presentation of the tags to the user (and filtering out from
presentation those name tags in languages the user doesn't know and can't
verify therefore). When there are many tags it is generally more difficult
to spot errors or problems, because of the sheer quantity.



> When is a
> name a name?
>


that's a general problem, that cannot be answered universally, and that
created and creates continuous disputes and inconsistencies throughout the
years of OSM's existence. Is "Friseur" (haircutter) a name if it's the only
writing on the sign? Is the correct name for the administrative entity of
Berlin "Berlin" or "Land Berlin"? And if it's "Land Berlin", shouldn't we
have 2 distinct objects then, one for the geographic place "Berlin" and one
for the administrative entity "Land Berlin"?

Cheers,
Martin
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