<html><head><style type="text/css"><!-- DIV {margin:0px;} --></style></head><body><div style="font-family:times new roman,new york,times,serif;font-size:12pt">Hi<br><br>> I see this case as a sort of learning opportunity for the OSM community.<br>> The community should use this case as an example of the problems to come<br>> and discuss remedies and create the community structure and the software<br>> to help solve the problem. Once we get into far bigger problems like the<br>> China/Taiwan issue we'll be glad that we had the chance to try out the<br>> problem solving capability on a smaller case.<br><br>Thanks for the very well put email. Suffice to say I agree strongly with the case you laid out for our community to respond to this situation.<br><br>> I don't know the details of<br>> the case but from what I see on the Wiki, some sensible looking agreements<br>> have been found and further steps are needed to actually
implement those<br>> agreements. I suspect Mikel knows more about the problem than we do and<br>> when he thinks that more needs to be done we should probably support<br>> him. Mikel: Can you elaborate on the issue? Who are the parties<br>> involved? Who agreed an what solution? Who is not keeping to the<br>> agreement?<br><br>I've avoided publicly speaking much about the specifics, to respect the parties involved and keep the mediation process in trust.<br>Now that mediation as apparently irreconcilably broken down, I feel I can describe in broad strokes what's happened.<br><br>The dispute is between David Janda, who lives in Northern Cyprus and originally brought up the issue on the talk list,<br>and an anonymous Greek Cypriot living in southern Cyprus with family roots in the North. The core of the edit war was<br>repeated editing of features in the anonymous editor's ancestral home into Greek, and back into Turkish, but also other
locations<br>in Northern Cyprus. The Greek Cypriot also objected to the name "Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus" for the entire region,<br>preferring "Northern Cyprus".<br><br>Through mediation we all came to agreement that "name" would be listed as A/B, and that "is_in" would not be TRNC. <br>However agreement could not be reached on whether Greek or Turkish would be listed first.<br><br>As a result, the OSM community discussed and proposed the 'on the ground rule' as the last resort in solving disputes,<br>which provides an mostly objective basis for deciding the content of "name". There is a lot of cultural and political issues<br>involved here, which are very interesting and difficult, but it's not really in our scope as OSM to decide on these. <br>The fact is that the Turkish military is presently in effective control of the area, and if you tried to navigate on the ground,<br>the names would mostly be in Turkish. To be less controversial, yet
still accurate, it is also suggested that the "is_in" tag<br>be set to the neutral name "Northern Cyprus" rather than TRNC. The Greek names are still present in the database, <br>and with technical improvements in time, multiple PoV will be represented in the main rendering.<br><br>The Greek Cypriot never agreed with this ruling, and has continued to carry out an edit war in the area. Though I'll also add,<br>that all edits in the region should be examined to see if anyone else has perpetuated this edit war. So this violation has led<br>to the current thread on what technical or social action to take.<br><br>Mikel</div></body></html>