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

[Jóhannes Birgir Jensson]

Þann 28.5.2015 15:38, skrifaði Andrew Guertin:
> 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.

I agree that the revert was maybe somewhat overzealous. While we do not 
have a viable and published method and procedures in place on how to 
handle multi-lingual names in a different manner, e.g. with an outside 
source, then reverting any name translations is hard to argue for.

The multi-lingual aspect of OSM is one of its absolutely strongest 
advantages. Being able to create maps of regions in the languages of the 
local population is quite simply fantastical and maybe under-appreciated 
by those who speak dominant languages, worldwide or regional.

As an example Botswana has English as an official language and Setswana 
as the overwhelming majority language. However it also has 20 smaller 
languages, some of them shared with neighboring nations and some very 
small local ones. Those languages already fight for their existence as 
the English names are given to their villages on official maps, with 
maybe the local in a footnote. Using OSM we can present them with maps 
of their own homes in their own languages.

So the question is also, do we outsource this strength of OSM? Wikidata 
has notability problems and so I'm wary of it, no matter the guidelines 
there is no shortage of people who deem their judgement in what human 
knowledge is worth retaining to be superior to everything else.

Is name inflation bad? Doubtful in my mind, even the opposite.

--Jói / Stalfur