Saturday, June 30, 2018

#AfricaGap - #Wikidata localisation is about location, location, location

Beitbridge is both a town, a ward and a district in Zimbabwe. Particularly for Wikidata they are distinct; the town is together with other human settlements part of the ward and it is with other wards part of the district.

In Wikidata it is best practice to associate buildings, monuments, bridges whatever with the lowest local authority.

It is obvious that when you cannot find the associated item for an authority, or associated structures on maps such associations will not happen. Human settlements in Lesotho for instance will not be found because at this time they only exist as "black links".. eg here for the community council of Likhutloaneng in Lesotho.

In order to find any and all of the African local authorities in a language, there has to be a label in that language. For us, in any and all of the Wikimedia projects we rely on our own labels, titles whatever. When we want to show them on a map, the best maps available will be more and more the OpenStreetMap maps. Thanks to a very important project just finished by Wikimedia developers, we can show localised labels. Our labels. To do this properly our and the OSM data needs to be linked on the object level. This provides us with map functionality in our 280+ languages and makes it obvious that the location for localisation is at Wikidata not OSM.
Thanks,
        GerardM

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