[Tagging] Chinese counties (was: Wiki: Chinese road names)

[Sarah Hoffmann]

On Fri, May 14, 2021 at 08:28:59AM +0200, Jeroen Hoek wrote:
> On 13-05-2021 23:45, Minh Nguyen wrote:
> > Is this the same user who suggested deprecating population=* in favor of
> > china_population=*?
> 
> Looks like the same user. I hope someone with Chinese language skills
> can reach out to them, because this has all the makings of a
> well-meaning individual establishing dubious de facto mapping practices
> on their own for a single (huge) country.
> 
> china_population=* is a way to fix a rendering problem without having to
> get in touch with Carto or working with others at all. Convenient, but
> ultimately harmful to the global database. Filling population=* with
> values designed to trigger render behaviour is not in line with OSM's
> guidelines.

China has a huge problem with tagging-for-the-render classification
of place tags. They basically have a 1:1 mapping between place type
and admin_level, instead of describing the kind of place. There is
even a huge warning on the China tagging page not to use population:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Chinese_tagging_guidelines

I was made aware that the tagging is explicitly chosen, so that the
county names render:
https://github.com/osm-search/Nominatim/issues/2251#issuecomment-813424984

I'm a bit at a loss what to do about it. It's square against OSM tagging
practises and it does mess up geocoding. But it's been the convention for
many years now and is widley accepted in the Chinese community, it seems.

Sarah