[Tagging] British English Spelling shop=jewelry

Jesse B. Crawford jesse at jbcrawford.us
Fri Jul 18 15:55:27 UTC 2014


On 2014-07-18 09:27 AM, Andreas Goss wrote:

>> I think for most of the mappers (including me) English is not their
>> primary language and I'm not sure what kind of mix of
>> British/American/out-of-the-blue/simply-wrong words I'm using.
> 
> At least in Germany (or at my school) there was a huge emphasis on
> using British English and using habor instead of habour or center
> instead of centre was flat out wrong. So in OSM I would always use
> that spelling, because that I would assume that is how it is supposed
> to be spelled.

Something I've noticed as an American that works with many foreign 
nationals is that the majority of people who learn English in a foreign 
country seem to learn British English - my sample may be biased since I 
work with a lot of people from India, which is a former colony, but 
amongst people from China and Germany for example I am also used to 
seeing the British spellings.

Even being part of the (small around here it seems) group that's 
inconvenienced by it, I think that it's important that the project 
standardize on British English. In the case of existing tags people will 
hopefully tend to use the spelling that's already predominant, but new 
tags are being added at such a rate that it's still an issue.

In the case of jewellery vs. jewelry (the former of which upsets my 
en_US spellchecker), I would encourage automatically correcting 
"jewelry" as a spelling error. Yes, there is value to looking at what 
tags currently exist, but people who are writing queries against the 
dataset shouldn't have to write several other queries just to take a 
guess at which spelling is the "accepted" one.

---
Jesse B. Crawford
Student, Information Technology
New Mexico Inst. of Mining & Tech

https://jbcrawford.us || jesse at jbcrawford.us
https://cs.nmt.edu/~jcrawford || jcrawford at cs.nmt.edu



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