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

[Maarten Deen]

On 2015-05-29 14:05, SomeoneElse wrote:
> On 29/05/2015 12:51, Maarten Deen wrote:
>> 
>> It depends on what you want. When someone asks me to navigate to 
>> Natanzon, Haifa how can I enter it when the only name in the map is 
>> נתנזון, חיפה?
>> I don't see why the transliterated name is not important.
> 
> No-one is saying that the transliterated name is not useful for all
> sorts of reasons (the thread title "can wikidata links help..." makes
> it clear that this is about trying to make it easier to get to these
> names, not harder).  The question here is, in a case when a name:xx
> isn't widely used in the place and doesn't appear on signs*, how can a
> user of the data know that they've got there or not?

The problem is that there is a "third" way of writing a place name. 
Namely the internationalized name of the place in the alphabet that you 
use.
Beijing is Peking in Dutch, but we commonly use Beijing these days. 
Other countries (Germany, France) are still more prone to using their 
transliteration.

For example: I do not want to see a map that shows name:nl for every 
place. Some are very obscure and may not be understood, others are more 
common but are just not used in normal life. I want to see name, but for 
non-Latin alphabets I probably want name:en.
But it should not be a big challenge to identify the character set 
that's used in a string, so it should also not be very difficult to know 
when to show name and when to show name:en.

On the other hand: for showing a map on my navigation device, I want to 
see what is on the signposts.
So it all depends on the usage.

> OSM shouldn't be it's own parallel universe - we map what's on the 
> ground.

Am I correct in thinking that your idea is not to have things that are 
not on the ground in OSM?
The problem with this is: to have translations by having to look up 
every name on an external website is not a very workable solution. That 
means having to load the complete database of that website before you do 
anything, or accept massive latencies for each lookup. And the relation 
that is used to lookup the data in this external database may break.
It is much more convenient to have name:xx in OSM.

Maarten