A new pseudo language code ‘link‘ has been added to the alternate name edit function and the links to the English Wikipedia have been inserted as alternate names. The links to the corresponding wikipedia articles have often been requested. While they were available on the forum linked in some threads, they were not included in the normal dump. With this simple change they can now be included in the dump as alternate names and they can easily be maintained using the wiki interface. All other kind of links, I think of hotel websites for hotel entries, can also be added in the same manner.
The language code for the alternate names are normally the 2-character ISO 639 language codes, for more exotic languages that do not have a 2-character ISO code the 3-character code is used instead.
Pseudo codes
- ‘post‘ for postal codes
- ‘link‘ for a link to a website
- ‘iata‘, ‘icao‘ and ‘faac‘ for the respective airport codes
- ‘abbr‘ for an abbreviation
- ‘fr_1793‘ for names used during the French Revolution
GeoNames Blog 