[Tagging] AE and BE orthography in tagging

[Matthijs Melissen]

On 27 April 2015 at 12:47, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
> Recently I had amened the shop=jewelry page with a short notice that
> shop=jewellery should be preferred, as this is British orthography and the
> generic tagging rules/guidelines state that tags should be in British
> English where possible.

Note that shop=jewelry is not the only US English term we use.

Others include (I'm not a native speaker so correct me if I'm wrong):
- railway=subway rather than railway=metro or railway=underground (in
UK English, a subway is a pedestrian underpass AFAIK).
- highway=elevator rather than highway=lift
- sport=soccer rather than sport=football.

I'm sure there will be others.

In the case of shop=jewelry, most data consumers only support the US
spelling. Usage stats for the UK spelling are currently about 1,1%.
Getting all data consumers to change to the US spelling would be a
huge hassle.

If we want to change spelling, I would prefer a choreographed process,
for example an announced automatic edit one year in the future, in
order to allow data consumers to prepare themselves.

-- Matthijs