Once upon a time there was an awesome maps company called Mapzen
<https://mapzen.com/>. All of their software was open source and all their
data sets were licensed under a free license.
Sadly they are shutting down <https://mapzen.com/blog/shutdown/>.
One of their projects was Who's on First <https://www.whosonfirst.org/> which
is a gazetteer <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gazetteer> of places. The
data is a huge collection
<https://github.com/whosonfirst-data/whosonfirst-data> of geojson files
hosted on github.
The place files include a concordance of ids in other systems... including
Wikidata. :)
Mapzen used the data in Wikidata in their Places API
<https://mapzen.com/documentation/places/> (source code
<https://github.com/whosonfirst/whosonfirst-www>) to translate place names.
I'm not sure if we would have any interest in using/importing this data in
Wikidata, but I thought I'd make more people aware of an awesome free
license data set that needs some help now that Mapzen is going away.
Thanks for everything you do!
David Barratt