[Tagging] Business names in capital letters

[Paul Allen]

On Sat, 14 Dec 2019 at 22:16, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com>
wrote:

>
> I agree, there are some more  examples like IBM and BP. The capitalization
> of the _name_ should be like it is used (and likely registered).


I was hoping (with no expectation of success) that nobody would open the BP
can of worms.

The company was "British Petroleum plc" but that was its formal name and it
was generally
referred to as "BP."   In 2001 it went through a renaming exercise and now
trades as "BP plc."
Prior to 2001 "BP" would have been an initialism and we might legitimately
have used
"British Petroleum" for the name and "BP" for the short_name.  Now BP is
the full name, and
it is no longer an initialism.  But "Bp" looks silly.  However, on their
greenburst logo, they
use "bp" (which also looks silly as a name on a map).  I haven't checked
what iD tries
to force on us, but I'd go with BP.

BP isn't the only company to adopt an initialism as its name.  British
Technology Group renamed
itself to BTG.  However, BTG was recently acquired by Boston Scientific,
who seem to be dispensing
with BTG as a trading name.


> I also agree with Frederik though, if we feel the orthography of their
> name is particularly designed to game lists or maps, like “the BEST foo” we
> can individually make exceptions and must not slavishly adhere to their
> marketing.
>

As with everything, it comes down to judgement.  We can't hope to produce
rules that can cope
with every possible eventuality, just general guides that may sometimes
have to be interpreted.

-- 
Paul
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/attachments/20191214/b9df196e/attachment-0001.html>