Once upon a time there was an awesome maps company called Mapzen. All of their software was open source and all their data sets were licensed under a free license.

Sadly they are shutting down.

One of their projects was Who's on First which is a gazetteer of places. The data is a huge collection 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 (source code) 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