Hi Serge,
The short answer to this is that the purpose of aliases in Wikidata is
to help searching for items, and nothing more. Aliases may include
nicknames that are in no way official, and abbreviations that are not
valid if used in another context. Therefore, they seem to be a poor
source of data to import into other projects.
Wikidata has properties such as birth name
(https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1477) that are used to provide
properly sourced multi-lingual text data for items.
Cheers,
Markus
On 10.03.2015 16:09, Serge Wroclawski wrote:
Hi all,
I'm a relative newcommer to Wikidata but long time OpenStreetMap contributor.
Recently OpenStreetMap has a situation where large numbers of
translated names have been added to OSM objects. When asked about the
origin of these names, I've been told a number of places, one of which
is Wikidata.
What appears to be happening, from what I've seen, is that there's a
small number of users copying data from other (not so reliable)
sources, and then putting that data in Wikidata as aliases for place
names, then when asked where the place names are from, they say
"Wikidata".
The problem here is that many of these "translations" are simply made
up. They're either transliterations or word for word translations,
rather than being genuine names in another language.
Unfortunately, it's my understanding that Wikidata aliases can't be
sourced (ie they can't be validated or invalidated like other facts).
If this is the case, it's a problem for both our projects.
I'd planned on my own implementation of using Wikidata names for
places in OSM to create custom renderings, but we need to be able to
know that the place names are something we can trace back and source
properly.
- Serge
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