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On the danger of politicised data, a 🧵…
As part of a project I'm working on, I need a database of cities with location and time-zone information. Looking around, I found the quite comprehensive and free "GeoNames" databases. /1
As part of a project I'm working on, I need a database of cities with location and time-zone information. Looking around, I found the quite comprehensive and free "GeoNames" databases. /1
So I downloaded the CSV file, turned it into a SQL database and did some queries. All was fine until I looked up my town. Who knew I was in "Palestine"? Worse, my time-zone was given as "Asia/Hebron", which is wrong. /2
After some investigation, I found another 42 towns which should be listed as IL and "Asia/Jerusalem" time-zone, but were instead listed as PS with the wrong TZ. This is dangerous, even resulting in death: darwinawards.com/darwin/darwin1… /3
Of course, "GeoNames" is crowdsourced, like Wikipedia, and therefore subject to the same level of data corruption. I don't know if the errors I found were intentional or mistaken, but the end result is the same: you must check the accuracy of data from external sources. /4
I've attempted to edit the faulty entries on GeoNames, but was only able to edit one entry. Fortunately, post-processing the data as needed is a matter of milliseconds. Caveat programmer! /5
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