About linking OSM bus stops with Wikidata for etymologies
by multimob — written on 2022-02-11
Members of the Brussels Parliament recently enquired how many bus stops were named after famous women with regards to men. This is a perfectly legitimate question but getting the answer can be really tricky.
The question had already been asked for street names. The OSM community came with a very creative solution, as such.
- Identify every street name in a given territory
- Determine whether the name honours a real person. This is not a trivial point: most street names in European cities are not given after people but celebrate places, rivers, neighbouring cities or boroughs, great battles from the past or mere concepts such as nature, freedom or the republic/kingdom
- Identify the person being honoured. This requires some research work because of possibly homonyms or because some names may refer to local politicians from a century ago, whom no-one really remembers.
- Add the
name:etymology:wikidatatag on the street and link to a Wikidata entry. Add it if necessary - Make sure that the Wikidata entry contains proper tags, in particular male/female gender. Other tags such as the nationality or dates of birth and death can be useful.
This represents a significant effort but it is really worth it because, once this is done, the system can be easily maintained. A bot can select all the street names in an area, and extract this tag, then extract the matching tags from the Wikidata entry. This was exemplified through the EqualStreetNames project, which does exactly that and shows statistics and a map with a different colour per gender.
With such an architecture, it is technically fairly easy to modify the code and filter on other criteria: what nationalities do those people have, or in what period of time did they live, for instance. It might also be interesting to know how many of those famous people were honoured for their actions or skills (such as architects or scientists) and how many were primarily honoured for being born in a royal family.
We can do the same for public transport stops. We started a review of stop names in Brussels, as a first test. The idea is to add name:etymology:wikidata to stop area relations. That way, we can easily query all stop area relations within a given territory or for one operator and know after whom they give the names for their stops.
Work is currently in progress, we expect it will take a couple more weeks of works to identify more stops, and help is of course always wanted. A first finding is that bus stops largely reflect the existing gender biases of street names. This is exactly what public transport operators say: they fully embrace the need for change and would be happy to rename stops after famous women. But they feel that, where most stops are named after the nearest street, it will make little sense to rename a stop if no appropriate (female) name is to be found in the area. Name more streets and squares after famous women and public transport will quickly follow, they say.
Permalink: https://blog.multimob.be/zzKoh7uo0u.htm