[OSM-talk] Wikipedia/Wikidata admins cleanup

[AJ Ashton]

On Wed, Jan 4, 2017, at 08:22, Christoph Hormann wrote:
> "The ID of the Wikidata item about the feature"
> 
> suggests a one-to-one relationship and having the same wikidata ID on 
> more than one feature would always be an error but taginfo tells us 
> that there are more than 22000 wikidata values that are used more than 
> once.

The idea of "One feature, one OSM element" is often thrown around but
it's not what happens in practice. Single roads and bridges are broken
in to many different ways. Provinces, cities, and towns might have both
a node and a way/relation that represent essentially the same concept. A
single named forest or other landuse area might be split into multiple
parts due to a clearing or a road or something.

Some of these situations might arguably be dealt with by adding
relations to unify the parts, but the problem is with the existing
mapping and not the wikidata tagging.

And obviously you will be able to find many example errors as with any
tag. But 22000 duplicate Wikidata IDs is not itself an indication of any
error.

AJ