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

[Christoph Hormann]

On Thursday 28 May 2015, Komяpa wrote:
>
> People in Russia usually use russian names of objects.
>
> Culturally, until google maps was invented, every family in xUSSR
> seemed to have ~300-page world atlas, (
> https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%90%D1%82%D0%BB%D0%B0%D1%81_%D0%BC%D
>0%B8%D1%80%D0%B0), that has all the names in the world in Russian.
>
> Not everybody can even read latin, at all. :)

I would consider places named in a 300 page world atlas to be fairly 
unproblematic for tagging with non-local name tags.  These names are 
widely used, you will probably not have a problem finding a dozen uses 
of any of them in a larger library in Russia and verification is 
generally a non-issue (unless there are several competing writings of 
course for which we have alt_name:lang tags).

But such an atlas will rarely contain more than 150k-200k names.  As 
soon as you add significantly smaller and less important places 
verifiability gets difficult.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/