[Tagging] Tagging of Country Names

[Kevin Kenny]

For names of countries, I'd suggest that they should be in whatever the
local mappers to a country consider the predominant language to be. For
users in other locales, presumably we have active enough English-speaking,
German-speaking, and so on communities that name:en, name:de, etc. would be
populated quickly - and any edit to 'name=*' that removes an English name
should add 'name:en=*' with the name.

That's enough for a renderer of a world map to render country names
localized for its intended users.

It does nothing for the names of smaller places. There, either we could
rely on Wikidata (slow!) or we could agree to start populating name:XX=
when convenient, so that 北京市 could be 'Bắc Kinh', 'Běijīng',  'Beijing'.
'Pékin', 'Peking', 'Pequín' or '베이징 시' as needed.

I think that's the most neutral possible answer: 'keep whatever the local
mappers use as the country name, and provide translations if someone takes
enough interest to enter them.' That's really what applies to any
geographic name.

One hopes that Thai local mappers will be judicious enough to enter either
บางกอก or
กรุงเทพฯ, and not burden the world with กรุงเทพมหานคร อมรรัตนโกสินทร์
มหินทรายุธยา มหาดิลกภพ นพรัตนราชธานีบูรีรมย์ อุดมราชนิเวศน์มหาสถาน
อมรพิมานอวตารสถิต สักกะทัตติยวิษณุกรรมประสิทธิ์, even though that's the
official name of the city we Westerners call 'Bangkok'.

On Wed, Oct 26, 2016 at 6:23 PM, David Bannon <dbannon at internode.on.net>
wrote:

> Sven, your approach makes sense assuming people only look at maps of their
> own country. Yes, I agree its respectful to people living in a non english
> speaking country but really does not address a much larger problem.
>
> As a native English speaker, I often turn to OSM to help me understand
> some of the global issues around at present. But even now, many of the
> place names are rendered in local language, quite unreadable to me. As has
> been suggested, a database of names in every conceivable language would be
> a ideal, then a renderer can deliver a map readable in an appropriate
> language. That does sound like wikidata ....
>
> So, I suggest its possible your solution improves a small aspect of a
> larger problem but just perhaps also makes that larger problem even worse ?
>
> David
>
>
> On 26/10/16 02:02, Sven Geggus wrote:
>
>> Hello,
>>
>> in our localized German map style we try to render Country names in German
>> with local name in parenthesis.
>>
>> This works fine for a lot of countries. An example would be Thailand:
>> Thailand (ประเทศไทย)
>>
>> or (more readable for westerners) France:
>> Frankreich (France)
>>
>> Unfortunately there are some countries where this will not work:
>>
>> Ägypten (Egypt مصر)
>>
>> So this is where the tagging discussion starts.
>>
>> I consider this a bad example of tagging for the renderer.
>>
>> English is not an official language of Egypt thus the string "Egypt" is
>> simply invalid in the countries name tag.
>>
>> What I consider valid would be the countires name in all of its official
>> langages.
>>
>> Thus the right one would be:
>> Ägypten (مصر)
>>
>> So I propose a correction of all country names to names into official
>> langages of
>> the respective countries only and to remove all english names.
>>
>> Any objectives?
>>
>> Sven
>>
>>
>
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