Hi Vahid, On Mon, Aug 24, 2026 at 8:05 PM Vahid Shaik via Wikimedia-l <[email protected]> wrote: > > 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.
Great to hear! > 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. Please see https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Data_access#Data_best_practices for an answer to this. > 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 Cheers Lydia -- Lydia Pintscher - https://lydiapintscher.de - WD:Q18016466 Portfolio Lead for Wikidata Wikimedia Deutschland e. V. | Tempelhofer Ufer 23-24 | 10963 Berlin Phone: +49 30 5771162-0 https://wikimedia.de Imagine a world in which every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge. Help us to achieve our vision! https://spenden.wikimedia.de Wikimedia Deutschland — Gesellschaft zur Förderung Freien Wissens e. V. Eingetragen im Vereinsregister des Amtsgerichts Charlottenburg, VR 23855 B. Als gemeinnützig anerkannt durch das Finanzamt für Körperschaften I Berlin, Steuernummer 27/029/42207. Geschäftsführende Vorständin: Franziska Heine. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- [email protected], guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/[email protected]/message/4NKCYCYSZ3JJMACMCC3CTJHWEVOIJFFM/ To unsubscribe send an email to [email protected]
