[openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website] Copyedit English localization as American English (PR #5029)

Richard Fairhurst notifications at github.com
Tue Jul 30 11:25:23 UTC 2024


I know this is well-intentioned and addresses a genuine technical issue, but I'm a little sad about this. It's essentially squashing one of the appealing aspects of OpenStreetMap's individuality in favour of unintentionally reinforcing some low-level cultural imperialism - i.e. the notion that the lingua franca of open source software is always American English. Having the project default to British English was always one of the little markers of "OpenStreetMap is different", a bit like Ruby's social norms being essentially Japanese.

The real issue appears to be a TranslateWiki/Mediawiki bug as linked in #4975, and I wonder whether some work around the osm-website/TranslateWiki interface (about which I know precisely nothing) could bypass that.

Of course, I haven't contributed to openstreetmap-website since approximately 1776[^1] so my viewpoint means ~diddly squat~ zip here. But it's a shame nonetheless.

That aside, I would suggest splitting the PR into "pure UI changes" and "tagging-related changes", because doing things like redefining `highway=track` has mapping implications of which, as we say in [insular Latin](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Insular_Latin), hic svnt dracones.

[^1]: I had to look that one up. I could tell you when the Synod of Whitby was though. Or the first Book of Common Prayer.

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