[Tagging] Tagging of Country Names

[Colin Smale]

Imagine for a moment an OSM world without the simple name=* tag. All
names have to be qualified with their language, so even in the UK we
would use name:en=*. This would make several things clear: 

* every name is in some language or other - useful for pronunciation,
prefix/suffix recognition, etc etc 

* OSM is not (primarily) about the map, but the data. Which elements are
visualised on a particular map is up to the rendering, with choices to
suit the particular audience 

* It might actually not be possible to make a world map that suits all
of the people, all of the time 

It is always easier to combine things, than to separate them. As an
example, in Egypt it should be pretty easy ito concatenate the English
and Arabic names, but not so easy to parse a combined string into the
constituents. The only raison d'etre for name=* is for the renderer.... 

Maybe we should consistently use int_name or name:int=* for an agreed
(single) international name, which could be used on an international
map. I guess this would usually be the English name (but it doesn't need
to be). 

By the way, I notice that no-one has changed the English name of the
Czech Republic into Czechia, as recently decreed by the Czech
government... I am also surprised that (according to the OSM data) that
country is also known as Czech Republic (sic) in languages bi, chy, ee,
hif, ik, pap, sco, and ty. I don't recognise the language codes but I
bet they don't all mean "English". But this is a different can of
worms....

--colin 

On 2016-10-25 19:55, Andy Townsend wrote:

> ‎> I think we should come up with a common sense rule what name should usually
> contain‎
> 
> I suspect that it might take some time before consensus is reached on that one :)
> 
> There have been a number of discussions about "what should be in a name" worldwide, and getting people within one country to agree is hard enough, especially in countries without official languages and within countries where "official" isn't the same as "most used". There's an ongoing discussion on talk-it about Sardinia, and the Algerian forum discussion from some time ago highlights a number of the problems with "combined names" (especially containing multiple character sets and both rtl and ltr script).
> 
> (re the proposed rendering) I  had thought of doing something ‎similar myself, but via lua at database load/update time - find the first name:xy that matches a substring of "name" and use that as "a local name in a local language". Never got around to actually doing it for real though.
> 
> As has already been said this _ought_ to be a job for wikidata. Normally scalability of wikidata queries would be an issue (if any can think of a workaround to that it'd be great to share) but the number of countries is limited enough to make that approach workable here perhaps?
> 
> Cheers,
> Andy
> 
> Original Message  
> From: Sven Geggus
> Sent: Tuesday, 25 October 2016 19:00
> Reply To: Tag discussion, strategy and related tools
> Subject: Re: [Tagging] Tagging of Country Names
> 
> Chris Hill <osm at raggedred.net> wrote:
> 
>> How would you propose making this change?
> 
> I think we should come up whith a common sense rule what name should usually
> contain (hence this discussion) and thus the tagging can be changed by
> mappers accordingly.
> 
> Currently the state is inconsistent (see Egypt vs. Thailand example).
> 
> I could also live with an "english-name native-name" rule because I could
> remove the english name automatically for my map. All I want to get rid of
> is the current inconsistency.
> 
> Regards
> 
> Sven
> 
> -- 
> "Das Einzige wovor wir Angst haben müssen ist die Angst selbst"
> (Franklin D. Roosevelt)
> 
> /me is giggls at ircnet, http://sven.gegg.us/ on the Web
> 
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