Reusing Wikidata's Arabic labels for place names — reliability and attribution practice?

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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