[Tagging] Tagging Digest, Vol 136, Issue 246

[stevea]

On Jan 23, 2021, at 2:41 PM, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
> still there should be a document where the council assigns a name to the street? At least around here, naming streets is something that the council does formally by voting on a proposed resolution.

Without wanting to be too political, there is also the idea that if a (city, township, county...) council/board/department of roads... doesn't give a name to something, "what people call it" is "less than" what the (council) says.  Here in the USA, this makes many people bristle, as "the council" are merely our employees.  Our constitution is written in the name of "We, the People..." (its first three words) and indeed, as the (councils) are our elected representatives, "what the People" (do, call...) things is truly sovereign.  This isn't true all over the world, yes, but it is true in the USA, from where Minh, Kevin and I write and map.  We want to map as correctly as we can, and we do read wiki about name, loc_name, official_name, old_name, nat_name, alt_name and so on.

So, sometimes, "the council" does NOT assign a name to the street, and it really IS "what People call it."  One could even say "by law," as here, We, the People are sovereign.  We don't need to fix our map, although many say we need to fix our country.  What we need are people to both better understand that there are different ways of doing things around the world and to keep an open mind that in OSM, we strive to respect those different ways of doing things.  We have the tags, mutual respect, wiki and good process it takes to do that.  We do.

We're mapping here.  We want to do our very best.

SteveA