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

[Andrew Guertin]

On 05/27/2015 05:13 PM, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Not only well-known tourist magnets carry foreign names; some dedicated
> language mappers have gone over and beyond the call of duty and added,
> for example, name:ru tags even to small villages:
>
>   http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/name%3Aru#map
>
> (This is a matter currently under investigation by Data Working Group
> and it is relatively certain that not all 582,653 name:ru tags will remain.)

Considering the existence of the former Soviet Union, and especially 
that there are areas of Ukraine where both Russian and Ukrainian are 
spoken and most roads, places, etc have names (and thus tags) in both 
languages, this number of 582,653 name:ru tags is hard to interpret.


My skill with overpass-turbo isn't the best, but I was able to 
relatively easily limit a search to a bounding box around North and 
South America. Within that box, a search returned 2648 nodes and 909 
ways with name:ru (relations timed out).

Considering "in 2007 Russian was the primary language spoken in the 
homes of over 850,000 individuals living in the United States"[1], 3500 
features with Russian names across all of North and South America seems 
very low, and there's lots of opportunity for more data to be added.

--Andrew

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russian_language#Geographic_distribution