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

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Sat May 30 15:08:17 UTC 2015


Hi,

Komяpa:
> What exactly are we trying to save by omitting these locales, what
wasn't eaten already by source= on French buildings? :)

Martin Koppenhoefer:
> even of tiger:name_base_1 there are more than a million, almost double the amount of all Russian names in osm.

Firstly:

It is a common fallacy for people in OSM to argue: "Someone else is
doing stupid things, and while they do that, everyone else should
certainly be allowed to do stupid things also."

I don't buy into that logic; just because silly (or sillier) stuff
happens elsewhere in OSM doesn't mean that lesser problems should
automatically be ignored.

Secondly:

I am less concerned about rubbish remaining from imports because that
can be cleaned up without someone complaining. I am more concerned about
things that become established and all of a sudden you find there's no
way back because people rely on it. KSJ2:filename is not one of these tags.

Thirdly:

My main problem with name tag inflation is not the data volume (even
though I can see this becoming an issue if someone should really argue
that each named object "has a name" in each of the several thousand
langauges on the planet!).

My problem is that people start labelling places they have zero
knowledge of, relying on military atlases from 50 years ago, or dubious
travel websites, or transliterated guesswork, or database lookups. In my
opinion this is often not verifiable, at least not for the usual sense
in which we use "verifiable".

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"



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