Re: Reusing Wikidata's Arabic labels for place n ames — reliability and attribution practice?

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

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Lydia Pintscher - https://lydiapintscher.de - WD:Q18016466
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