We are excited to be at Wikimania 2017 to meet this incredible community, and exchange ideas on bringing together two amazing open data projects — Wikidata and OpenStreetMap.
Currently, there are more than 750,000 map features linked to Wikidata — twice the amount of what it was in December 2016 — and 926,000 features linked to Wikipedia in the OpenStreetMap database. That number continues to grow every minute.
When Wikidata and OpenStreetMap work together, they create a powerful wealth of knowledge. This integration can power interactive maps on Wikipedia and unlock a wide range of possibilities like translated world maps or thematic maps using information crowdsourced from Wikidata.
In the map above, Arun and Rasagy demonstrate the power of this collaboration with an exploration of country names in various languages of the world.
The geographic shapes of countries are rendered from crowdsourced map data in OpenStreetMap and the corresponding language translations come from live querying the Wikidata entity. This is possible because the country feature on OpenStreetMap is linked to its matching Wikidata entity as an additional property. The lookup is done dynamically and the results improve over time as more Wikidata volunteers contribute country translations.
Start contributing open data
Take a look at this mapping guide to start linking more OpenStreetMap features to Wikidata or contribute a missing Wikidata translation.
If you are attending Wikimania 2017, join Mikel Maron and Minh Nguyễn for the hands on mapathon to connect OpenStreetMap and Wikidata, and interact with us during our lightning talk and poster presentations.
To learn more, read about our efforts to scale OpenStreetMap with Wikidata knowledge that brings the two amazing knowledge projects together and how Mapbox is using Wikidata to power various products and tools. Feel free to get in touch with me on Twitter if you have ideas and suggestions for improving this process.
Exploring the world with Wikidata and OpenStreetMap was originally published in Points of interest on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.