[Tagging] Feature Proposal - Voting - (Remove name_1 and alt_name_1 from wiki)

[Andy Townsend]

On 26/01/2016 19:16, Mateusz Konieczny wrote:
> In my experience name, name:en, old_name, alt_name, alt_name:ru etc 
> etc etc were always sufficient. An example where multivalue names are 
> truly necessary would be interesting.

Here's a brief summary of where I think that what we have now for names 
isn't "always sufficient":

There are places that have two or more names in different languages.  
One is not more important that the other; they're exactly equivalent.  
We don't have a way to represent that currently - only to store a list 
of names (in one format or another).  We only have one "name" tag, and 
in some places the local community have decided on the 
"Londonderry/Derry" approach because there is no correct answer to which 
of two (or more) local languages should go there.  Even then there's 
still the decision of which one to put first :)

There's also the "Abergavenny problem" (a term I invented the last time 
it came up on the lists) - there are places with multiple languages 
which are in local use, and also names in other languages not in local 
use (often but not always transliterations to a non-Latin alphabet).  We 
don't currently have a good way of differentiating between those two sets.

We also have the potential problem that if we stored every translated / 
transliterated name into every one of ethnologue.com's languages we'd 
have an unfeasibly large amount of data per place - it would make any 
data manipulation operations with OSM data significantly more 
cumbersome.  In answer to that last problem someone usually says 
"wikidata" but we don't yet have a tried, tested and scaleable way of 
combining data from wikidata with data from OSM on the fly.

Some more of the issues associated with multiple languages in a place 
were discussed in the Algerian forum:

http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=31333

There were issues raised there that I hadn't previously considered, 
including combining a left-to-right and right-to-left name in a 
"Londonderry/Derry"-style name, and what happens when the most widely 
spoken language and the official language aren't the same.

Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)