Wikipedia is changing to an OSM-compatible Creative-Commons license. See http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Licensing_update/Questions_and_Answers. Although it isn't officially official yet, it is pretty clear that the licensing will be fixed very soon. This means we will be able to use WP data in OSM.

We don't want to make OSM a POI dumping ground for every geocoded Wikipedia article. But some data makes sense to use as a source for permanent OSM map data. The wikipedia infoboxes are moderately consistent codifications of data. Extracts are available at infochimps.org. These can be used, with some pain, to create data to load into OSM.

The first thing I'm looking at is airports. They tend to be permanent landmarks, and have map-worthy data of both name labels and runways, which makes them good candidates for import.

Using this, I have been working on some scripts to turn the airport infobox data into OSM aerodrome nodes, and approximately-located runway ways. I create an aerodrome node with the designated lat/lon, and related information. I download surrounding existing OSM data, and merge the new node with any existing aerodrome node within 0.0100 degrees. I keep name variations as alternate ("name_1", "name_2") node names. I check for runways nearby, and if there aren't any, and the WP data has runway info, I create new runway ways. I use the length in meters, and the angle from the runway name (runway "3/21" = 30 degrees/210 degrees), and center it on the designated point.

I do these 5 at a time, and load the results into JOSM. I use the aerial photos (Landsat or Yahoo as available) to move the runway into the right place. The angles and location are close, so it is not hard to get them in the right place. It is annoying that the runways are often (always?) named for magnetic north rather than true north, but with the aerial photos it is easy enough to line them up correctly anyways.

I've fixed 200 or so airports so far. Only a few thousand to go.