Immich Traditional Chinese Geodata (4): Translating Place Names with Wikidata, and How It Fails Silently
··1590 words·4 mins
The previous post, Five Regions, Five Strategies, noted that place names written in non-Han scripts, as in Thailand and Indonesia, can only go down the translation route, and that the translation source this project settled on is Wikidata.
What follows is not about how to query. SPARQL itself is not the hard part. The hard part is this: when Wikidata gets it wrong, there is usually no sign at all. The pipeline does not stop, the log reports no error, and the output is a perfectly valid Chinese string that simply points to the wrong place.