This blog entry describes how and why the following module was developed:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:OSM

In the mean time I added extensive documentation to it, which might be more interesting than what I wrote here… so go and have a look!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Module:OSM/doc

With the advent of Wikidata my interest in Wikipedia flared uponce more. I’m a mapper for Openstreetmap in the first place, but last year I already made a little sidestep to Wikivoyage. That’s a project which is closer in many ways to Openstreetmap than Wikipedia.

Recently I started adding wikidata tags to streets and other objects in Openstreetmap. Which in itself doesn’t do all that much. So a way is needed to make this available to the rest of the world. Wikipedia seems like the way to accomplish this.

I had already experimented a bit with links to saved queries on Overpass Turbo. But creating these queries from scratch over and over again and creating such links to them, isn’t the most straightforward way to get things done.

When it became clear to me that sometimes an additional query of wikidata may be necessary, before invoking Overpass, I knew I had to tackle the problem in another way.

This made me look into Lua, the scripting language which was chosen to automate the plethora of MediaWiki projects. After one day I came up with a working script (in the mean time it’s been developed quite a bit further):

On the Dutch Wikipedia reception was luke warm. I’m afraid, I hadn’t been able to carry across what I was trying to achieve. On the English Wikipedia a Lua developer saw the potential and he helped me to improve the code and explained me how to go about adding test cases. This helps a lot to not introduce bugs while attempting to add new features. For the case of querying several Q-numbers at once using a regex query, help came from a specialist in Overpass.

So this saved query:

[http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/aFt]

now looks like this in the article:

{{#invoke:OSM

etym

display=Streets named after Leuven

timeout=50

query=[highway]

coord=50.879;4.701;9}}

which results in the following query:

[timeout:50][out:json]; ( node[“name:etymology:wikidata”=”Q118958”]highway; // remove the ({{bbox}}) if you want the query to be executed globally way[“name:etymology:wikidata”=”Q118958”]highway; relation[“name:etymology:wikidata”=”Q118958”]highway; ); out geom;

The difference with the stored query is that only streets closer to Leuven are fetched. If the user wishes to do so they can either remove the ({{bbox}}) statements or they can move the map to another region and press Run. In case the user also wants to see other objects named after Leuven, they can remove the [highway] part.

Now, let’s hope the Wikipedia contributors at large see value in this. I deployed it on the French Wikipedia as well and will probably continue with Spanish, German and Esperanto. Feel free to deploy it on other language versions as well. I will keep all the modules in sync. I’m only going to develop test cases on the English Wikipedia, so that will be the primary place to continue development. One test is failing because of lack of arbitrary access, but that should be resolved shortly.

Actually there is a whole plethora of possibilities:

• objects named after the subject of the Wikipedia article (on condition they got name:etymology:wikidata tags on the OSM side)
• the object of the article itself (on condition they got wikidata tags on the OSM side)
• other objects related to the article (this is probably not OK with Wikipedia policies)
• objects of which the subject of the article is the architect or the artist who created them (architect and artist.wikidata)
• objects related directly to the subject (subject.wikidata), this can be tombstones as well
• objects carrying brand:wikidata or operator:wikidata tags
• relations representing public transport lines. The names of the stops are emphasized with help of MapCSS styles