I suspect these are not wikidata aliases. They are probably labels in other languages. 

While wikidata doesn't have a multilingual datatype it does allow you to add labels (and aliases) in any language and these labels, if they are correct, are the appropriate thing to use to localise osm place names

Hope this helps

On 10 Mar 2015 22:21, "Markus Krötzsch" <markus@semantic-mediawiki.org> wrote:

On 10.03.2015 17:09, Daniel Kinzler wrote:

Am 10.03.2015 um 16:55 schrieb Markus Krötzsch:

Hi Serge,

The short answer to this is that the purpose of aliases in Wikidata is to help
searching for items, and nothing more. Aliases may include nicknames that are in
no way official, and abbreviations that are not valid if used in another
context. Therefore, they seem to be a poor source of data to import into other
projects.

Wikidata has properties such as birth name
(https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1477) that are used to provide properly
sourced multi-lingual text data for items.

Note: Wikidata doesn't yet support multilingual property values, only
"monolingual" (language + value). However, multiple statements about the
respective property can be used to provide values in different languages. That's
actually desirable in this case, since it allows different sources to be given
for different languages.

Good point; my formulation was ambiguous. In fact, alias-like properties are a case where you really want "monolingual text" data, since there is no one-to-one correspondence between aliases in different languages.

Markus

For towns and streets, the best property to use would probably be "official
name" https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Property:P1448

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