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

[Andrew Guertin]

On 05/28/2015 07:07 AM, SomeoneElse wrote:
> On 28/05/2015 10:30, Komяpa wrote:
>> Hello,
>>
>> I'd like to share my story.
>>
>> We're making a new Global Map for World of Tanks game.
>> Game is translated into many languages, of which Russian and English
>> are most significant.
>> Now we're in open beta, you can look at the map at
>> https://ru.wargaming.net/globalmap/
>>
>> To release the map, we need the whole map in Russian, and in English.
>>
>> For closed beta, we chose to enable a small subset of a map, 80
>> provinces, for which I manually added the translations:
>> http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/30451655
>>
>> This changeset got reverted by SomeoneElse:
>> http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/30706979
>>
>> Now we can't use OSM to render the map directly.
>>
>
> Sure you can.  You just need to combine OSM data with some other data
> (such as a list that you've previously created).
>
> The problem (described in some detail on my changeset above) is that the
> fact that somewhere like Abergavenny has two names (or three, if you
> count the old Latin name).  Both "Abergavenny" and "Y Fenni" are
> verifiable on the ground, by looking at the "Welcome to..." sign on the
> roads in.  "Абергавенни" does not appear on that sign.

A quick internet search shows plenty of results for Абергавенни, 
including Wikipedia, hotel booking sites, and Harry Potter websites, and 
by looking at Google's book results, you can see that it's been in use 
since at least the 1800s. And with just a few minutes' look, I found 
someone from the next city over using the name[1]. I understand this was 
just an example, but it seems to show the opposite of what you wanted. 
The town with the English name Abergavenny also has a Russian name 
Абергавенни, which is in use by locals, and has been established for 
hundreds of years.

> Ethnologue (http://www.ethnologue.com/world) says that there are > 7000
> languages in the world. Taginfo
> (http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/search?q=name) says that there are >
> 45,000,000 names in OSM.
>
> It's a perfectly reasonable request for someone to ask "can I have a map
> that shows place names displayed in my language / alphabet". It's not a
> reasonable request to ask OSM to store up to 7,000 variants against
> 45,000,000 names, when most of those objects simply do not have names in
> those languages.

While your exact words here aren't wrong, I think you're severely 
underestimating what objects have names in what languages. Russia and 
the UK are major world powers that have had a lot of interaction as both 
allies and enemies, economically, militarily, and culturally, and there 
are tens to hundreds of thousands of people who were born in Russia 
living in the UK[2]. It would be pretty absurd to for place names NOT to 
exist, and as shown above the evidence shows that they do exist and are 
in use.

For that reason I think the revert was wrong, and the edit should be 
allowed to be re-performed.

--Andrew

[1] http://kuking.net/my/viewtopic.php?t=12946
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russians_in_the_United_Kingdom