[Tagging] Country names

[Jochen Topf]

On Wed, Oct 13, 2010 at 11:14:37PM -0400, Peter Budny wrote:
> Looking at very high zoom levels on Mapnik, I noticed that the East
> Asian countries (Japan, China, etc) have their names written in native
> script with the English name in parentheses, but a lot of other
> countries (e.g. all the ones with Arabic characters) don't seem to
> follow this.
> 
> Why the inconsistency?  Either way makes sense, but shouldn't we pick
> one and stick with it?

Yes we probably "should". But have you ever tried to get 100.000 people to
agree to anything, especially when every day a few thousand new people come
in that haven't heard any previous discussion and just want to solve their
own little problem?

The "right" solution is probably to put the different names in "name:<language
code>" tags. Thats how it has been document for a long time. But it doesn't
matter what the "right" solution might be, if it doesn't solve the problem that
people have. And one problem they have is that maps are hard to use if you
can't read half the country names.  Beeing consistent is important, but more
important is the community and pragmatic solutions to solve current problems.

This is one of those problems that will not be solved until the renderers
get more clever and, for instance, take the "name" tag and the "name:en" tag
and put them together in the "local name (english name)" form. Only then can
we tag this consistently. (Feel free to work on that problem :-)

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  http://www.remote.org/jochen/  +49-721-388298