SMP (2015-02-04 10:48:25+00:00): I am not mass copying data from Wikipedia to OSM. I have just read these two guidelines and I do not think any of them applies to me. The Import Guideline is for copying the whole data of one single source, and I am not doing that. I am adding Catalan names for various important cities and regions in the world and obviously they coincide with those in Wikipedia because I choose the most common name in Catalan and Wikipedia chooses it as well (other common names I add them in the alt_name:ca key or similar keys). At least in one case I have diverged from the Wikipedia choice. In changeset #27892027 I named relation 45757 as "Trentino - Tirol del Sud" instead of Wikipedia name "Trentino - Alto Adige". My naming choice is also very used in Catalan texts and it is not so insulting for South Tyroleans, but I admit that there is a slight ideological bias from my part in that choice. The Mechanical Edit Policy clearly does not apply because it states: "This policy does not apply to edits made truly by hand. If you select each post box in your city and add an operator tag to them, then we assume that you are indeed looking at the individual object and improving the data from your knowledge or a survey, and that's ok. You can even use your editor's search-and-replace function for that but only if you check each individual action caused by this, rather than just mechanically changing things. The same applies to imports - if you manually check each data object that gets imported, you are outside of the scope of this policy."

Regarding Gran Enciclopèdia Catalana (GEC), I mentioned that it is the authority that I use (and Catalan Wikipedia uses) to verify the common use of exonyms, but the situation is exactly the same. In fact, I have more discrepancies with them than with Catalan Wikipedia, because the latter is more up-to-date. For example, Catalan spelling now recommends to use space characters around the hyphen “-“ character when it is uniting names with more than one word. Catalan Wikipedia follows this new rule while GEC has not changed yet and it still uses old names. An example is relation 3772890 the Barcelona district “Sarrià - Sant Gervasi” which in GEC is still “Sarrià-Sant Gervasi”. In official documentation from the Barcelona City Council, the spelling varies between the two alternatives with latter documents increasingly using the new rule and that is why I chose “Sarrià - Sant Gervasi”. An example of this particular rule applied to and exonym is Mecklenburg-Vorpommern (relation 28322) which in changeset #28271729 I named “Mecklemburg - Pomerània Occidental” instead of GEC “Mecklemburg-Pomerània Occidental”.

On why I use some transliterations, first let me tell that I have used transcriptions instead of transliterations whenever it is possible (eg. Russian). In any case, I use transliterations/transcriptions precisely because they are the names in common use! You will never read in a Catalan newspaper that some meteorite has fallen in Тульская область, it will always say “província de Tula”. In my opinion, for someone reading the Catalan-language rendered map of OSM, it is much more useful to have this name than the Cyrillic one. Moreover, whenever the transliteration/transcription is not the common used name, I have not used it! For example, in node 160257516 “Batum” instead of Batumi, or in node 29438069 “Càndia” instead of Iràklio. In node 1614277087 I used the transcription “Tblissi” instead of the traditional name Tiflis but just because nowadays it is much more used in the media, and anyways “Tiflis” was added as alt_name:ca. Again I basically used Wikipedia (which in turn is usually based in GEC) to verify in each case which names are more commonly used, whether the transcription, the transliteration, or another name. Now I do not know whether this is correct or incorrect.

I certainly do not like the communication means in OSM. I am writing this huge text here because otherwise I do not know where to defend my point of view in OSM in general. Some months ago the possibility of discussing changesets did not even exist, so I do not know how we would do such a public discussion which obviously must be done. Also, this discussion feels much more aggressive than it should. I do not mind to change my modus operandi if I am doing something wrong or it can be improved. I would even revert my problematic edits if OSM had a revert tool. I am also baffled that OSM is not striving to collaborate with other Free Culture initiatives such as Wikipedia. I am also baffled that OSM has a standard editor (iD) that designs a name translation feature using a mechanism that apparently is discouraged.

Finally, what I said and you can read in my comment above is that I have learned so much from Wikipedia that I cannot distinguish what part of my knowledge comes from it. Every time I have added a museum, a street or a statue, it is entirely possible that I first knew about its existence, its name, its nature, etc. by reading Wikipedia. Therefore, in all of my edits there might be pieces of data that coincide with data from Wikipedia. You asked me to identify which of my changesets use data from Wikipedia and I am completely unable to even imagine a method that is able to discriminate my changesets based on that criteria.