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

[Jóhannes Birgir Jensson]

Þann 28.5.2015 19:43, skrifaði Frederik Ramm:
> Hi,
>
> On 05/28/2015 09:19 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>> What I would not support in OSM, and like to outsource to Wikidata or
>> other, is if speakers of these 20 languages were to start assigning name
>> tags in their language to thousands of places in, say, the UK.
> *Especially* if their reasoning was that this makes it nicer for them to
> run a tank through these places in their own-language war simulation
> with their buddies.
Disclaimer, I own some of the tanks that might run through some of the 
places. As any consumer I've been critical of their work and loved and 
hated it with equal passion, depending on what they did in the last 
patch release.

Having said that the one nice thing about open projects is the added 
value people put into them and get out of them for a myriad of reasons. 
A gaming company adding information (yes it is information) to the map 
can be beneficial to another consumer, for example a Russian style 
TripAdvisor or something completely different.

Is a gaming company not worthy of adding information? Again a matter of 
where do you draw the line. They are not inventing new towns or places, 
they are not creating battlefields. Do we now require each contributor 
to disclose the reason for why they are adding information to the map?

This revert and discussions about it should not become too specific to 
the contributor whose work was reverted. These edits and reverts point 
at a vital issue as we try to grow the map in areas where hundreds of 
languages suddenly eye the ability to get maps in their own languages 
using the OSM data and tools that exist for it. I propose the OSMF 
tackle these two questions, who should be able to add information to the 
map and what do we do about languages and where are the limits.

--Jói / Stalfur