As to adding wikidata tags in Africa, as DevonF points out this is far away from where you have local knowledge and can verify your edits. It is even more dicey than usual because Africa is full of bad place data mainly from (again mostly undiscussed and unvetted) HOT related imports, adding more stuff on top is not going to help.
Far from stale; it’s resulted in a good deal of ongoing, policy-complaint work which has engendered support from local mappers in a number of parts of the globe.
Indeed. “GNS” seems to be the main culprit for “unlikely positional data”, such as https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2229102764 which apparently has a latitude of “-1”. I don’t doubt that there’s something around there (the Bing imagery suggests habitation to the west) but a latitude of “-1” just means “clearly this data is rubbish”
To: all please stick to the topic. No personal attacks. No mention of race or nationality. No generalisations. Thank you
Please spend your time to answer questions instead of fighting one another.
Every OSM feature with a Wikidata tag was extracted and converted to a centroid. This was looked up with the Wikidata location and the circle styling is based on the distance. Big red circles are matches over 10km apart.
The styling needs some more tweaking since most of the large distance mismatches are on area features like districts, where the locations would indeed vary. Hoping this helps both communities fix data on the respective projects. Code: https://github.com/osmlab/wikidata-osm/
@pigsonthewing it looked stale because it was still written as a proposal from years ago and I can’t seem to find any bot/tool associated with it on that page. Maybe that wiki page needs updating?
@PlaneMad cool map! Interesting to pick out some of the mistakes which have propagated. For example check out the town of Chesterville ON. The place node. @DenisCarriere added the wikipedia page which is legit. Then recently @LogicalViolinist added the wikidata ID but clearly whatever tool he used didn’t notice that the Chesterville wikipedia was a redirect to North Dundas and so added that wikidata ID instead. And so now it’s obvious that Mapbox prefers to use names based on the wikidata id, not the OSM database since now there are two North Dundas.
I’m doing it almost the same way (inspired by nyuriks ) but I find iD much faster for manual updates.
Actually, I think the automatic updates (i.e. matching wikidata ID to existing wikipedia link) should be done by some bot regurarly, so that only objects requiring manual actions are left. In Poland there are a few new wikipedia links missing wikidata ID every day, also in other countries I could see nyuriks has been before me, but new wikipedia links have been added since.
But they didn’t. WE didn’t, should I say. Write. Whatever.
The mismatches were there before, just nobody caught it earlier until wikidata IDs were added. Don’t look at it as creating mismatches, but as noticing them. Mass adding wikidata IDs is preparing grounds for cleaning wikipedia issues, like nyuriks’ list of disambiguation pages. We would be better off if some bot did it on daily basis, it’s a mechanical job really. Only what is left after this mechanical job, requires mappers’ attention. This includes:
correcting wikipedia titlesa that have changed since copying them to OSM
Finding incorrect links to wikipedia
Creating relations for rivers, highways and others(*)
…
I think all these tasks are easier when we have wikidata IDs.
(*)I have placed GitHub issue to reveal that an object belongs to relation that has a wikipedia link and/or website defined so that users won’t try to add wikipedia link to every member of relation - please back me up there if you think it makes sense
In this case they weren’t. What tends to happen is something like:
o OSM has an object for a village and an admin entity
o An OSM user adds a wikipedia tag to the admin entity. The wikipedia entry describes itself as covering both the village and the admin entity, so that’s OK.
o A wikipedian writes a bot that creates a wikidata item from the wikipedia article. The bot creates wikidata entries for villages, not admin entities. That’s not entirely wrong, because the wikipedia article actually covers both.
o A different wikipedian spots that there is an OSM admin entity and a wikidata item with the same name in a similar location and links them via a wikidata tag. This results in the wrong OSM entity being linked to a wikidata item.
That’s not exactly the case here. What happens now is: there are two OSM objects with the same Wikipedia link, so they get the same wikidata IDs. At least if we are still talking about the semiautomated adding of wikidata IDs that nyuriks and I do.
I think that the bottom line is that if you’re adding a wikidata link to OSM you have to check that the wikidata article actually applies to the OSM object - you can’t rely on what’s happened between wikipedia and wikidata to ensure that.
And that’s what we do for every link that does not get wikidata ID on batch run.
Still, I think it’s better to do this batch run as the majority of wikipedia links is correct and then catch doubled wikidata IDs than do all this job manually link by link.
One thing worries me, cause I may not understand wikidata correctly: Is it all right to have two wikidata entries pointing to the same wikipedia article?
I think that is possible. It is possible to describe a group of objects in Wikipedia (e.g. a museum and the paintings in it, while the painting might already be a separate Wikidata item.
Just look at this map: https://a.safe.moe/3cC0P.png
This map entirely created from wikipedia data, no OSM at all.
Pointer at POI with text “Wikipedia: Messages about errors/Archive/2011/09”
If so, we should definitely add wikidata=* to wikipedia=* as automatically as possible, then hunt for doubled wikidata values and create additional wikidata entries for separate entities.
That’s what appears to have happened so far, and it has devalued the work that people have done adding valid wikidata entries. Someone processing wikidata values in OSM would have to do some postprocessing:
“Was this tag added by someone who has added a lot of wikidata links? If so, I’d better ignore it”.
The link between wikipedia and wikidata is already present in wikidata - simply duplicating it in OSM without any checking adds no value. Adding wikidata links for which you have local knowledge does add value.
) but I find iD much faster for manual updates.
