Hi all, I run an Arabic-first prayer-times site (https://waqtazan.com). It is not a Wikimedia project, but it leans on open geodata, and I have hit a gap I suspect this community knows more about than I do.
We publish one server-rendered page per city, in Arabic. Our rule is that a city ships only if it has a verified Arabic name — we never machine- transliterate one, because a wrong place name in Arabic is worse than an absent city. That rule is expensive: a large share of our live names still fall back to GeoNames, which is inconsistent for Arabic, and cities without a trustworthy name are simply excluded. Wikidata is the obvious candidate source. Before I lean on it, three questions: 1. How reliable are Wikidata `ar` labels for settlements in practice? My worry is that many are bot-imported transliterations rather than the endonym a local reader would recognise. Is there a way to tell the two apart at scale? 2. Labels are CC0, so there is no legal attribution duty. But what is the community norm for a project reusing them at this scale? I would rather over-credit than under-credit, and I would like to do it the way the movement expects. 3. Is anyone already working on Arabic labels for settlements outside the Arab world — Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia, West Africa? That is exactly where our coverage thins out, and if there is an existing effort I would rather contribute to it than duplicate it. Happy to be told I am framing any of this wrong. Thanks, Vahid https://waqtazan.com <https://aka.ms/GetOutlookForMac>
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