I was the person who adds most of the labels to London, so I want to share also my thoughts. I did this for all capitals and countries in the world to be able to create worldmaps in different languages. Such world maps in local languages are known from each school atlas and are used in local television news.
For this action I use Wikipedia article names. So London was in each language important enough to write an article about it in this language. Which is a lot of work, someone invested. Before this action I checked and discuss that there was no legal issue by using Wikipedia article names. Now they are at Wikidata under CC-0 so definitely free. The bias in this discussion that English labels are ok and helpful but other languages are not, is scary for me. Please take a look at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers and find that English is only on place 3 of the list. We have a good chance that we will see in short-therm multilingual maps in lots of websites by using vector tiles. And in this moment we really want to make it harder to add such translations? Now to Frederiks proposal: To use Wikidata is really an interesting idea to reduce duplicated work, also for more than place names. With some pre-condition we could talk more positive about Frederiks proposal: *There should be in the future an additional, official version of planet-dumps and diffs that are enrich with content from Wikidata. Such a service must be stable as the other planet dumps. This service would kill the argument that it is harder to use external database Wikidata for apps. If not we create duplicated work for developers that we want to avoid elsewhere. *We would need much more Wikidata tags in OSM, now we have only 35.000 and for wikipedia-Tags we have also only 450.000. But I have a database of 3.5 Mio Wikipedia-objects that have a coordinate. So there is work for years. *We should also discuss with the Wikidata community the scope of there project. Perhaps we can come to a point where everything is inside the scope that is interesting for a Wikimedia project AND for OpenStreetMap. But if we come with the idea that we want to store opening hours for little shops in Wikidata I'm sure that the Wikidata community would not be amused to it. (I already try it.) So before we have something of the pre-conditions on the horizont I think it's easier go further with the way of name tags we have now for years. Tim alias Kolossos _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
