[Tagging] Tagging of Country Names

[Simon Poole]

On 25.10.2016 21:47, Kevin Kenny wrote:
> It gets even more complicated in places of disputed sovereignty, where
> the choice of name makes a political statement and speech is not as free
> as it usually is in the West. In the PRC, it would actually be unlawful
> to put the name 中華民國 (or 中华民国) on a map, while in Taiwan, it
> might be lawful to put 臺灣, but would be regarded as politically
> suspicious. 中华台北 is an ambiguous fiction that satisfies nobody, and
> WTO's 臺澎金馬個別關稅領域 is no better.

That however is a different can of worms, this discussion is mainly
about what countries call the territories over which they have actual
control, not about what some countries would like to call countries that
they have no control over (and there is a fair number of such conflicts).

Naturally even the current topic can be politically/culturally sensitive
(which is one of the reasons we end up with these multiple names names),
but much less so than territorial claims.

> 
> Some problems don't have good solutions.
> 

IMHO trying to make everybody happy wrt such claims is outside the scope
of OSM and unlikely to be possible in any case.

Simon

> 
> On Tue, Oct 25, 2016 at 3:25 PM, Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch
> <mailto:simon at poole.ch>> wrote:
> 
> 
>     As an inhabitant of one the countries mentioned with multiple official
>     languages may I quickly chip in: our previous solution was to simply
>     leave the name tag empty given that stuffing the 4 official language
>     variants in to the name tags was rather unwieldy and even so none of
>     them are actually the countries real official name (see
>     http://official-name-abbreviations-meaning.all-about-switzerland.info/
>     <http://official-name-abbreviations-meaning.all-about-switzerland.info/>)
>     .
> 
>     This proved impossible to maintain due to fiddling mappers living in a
>     neighbour country to the north, so to get a bit of peace and quiet (we
>     would have been quite happy with using English on the standard
>     rendering), we opted for the current ungainly solution.
> 
>     The real simple solution would be to provide a tag with a list of the
>     countries official languages and then allow the renderer to choose from
>     them in the cases when you want a non-translated name value (and as said
>     leave the name tag empty).
> 
>     Simon
> 
> 
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