GLAM/Newsletter/April 2021/Contents/Finland report

Finland report

Saami place names

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Wikimedia Finland and Norway are planning to work on importing Saami places names to Wikidata as lexicographical data. Wikimedia Norway has already imported places with Northern, Lule, and Southern Saami place names in Norway to Wikidata, while Wikimedia Finland is still in the process of doing that with the places with Northern, Inari, and Skolt Saami names in the Place Names Register of the National Land Survey in Finland. The work is done in dialogue with Finnish institutions involved in recording place names. We are working with people from the National Land Survey of Finland, the National Library of Finland, FINTO, Kotus, Institute for the languages of Finland, Giellagas Institute, University of Oulu, SeCo, HELDIG, and the Finnish Environment Institute.

While preparing for the project, we have sidetracked on many interesting paths to find the best possible methods for doing spatial reconciliation, matching new geographic data to items already in Wikidata. The project documentation page reports on experiments with Mix'n'Match, Wikishootme, QGIS and OpenRefine. In the Wikimaps Telegram group we have discussed matching OSM data to items on Wikidata with the OSM ↔ Wikidata matcher. At the Wikimedia hackathon we hope to learn to use Jupyter notebooks to do some part of the process. Contact Susanna Ånäs if you are interested in similar challenges!