[Tagging] I am reverting an edit to the "Names" page on the Wiki

[bgo_eiu (OSM mailing list email)]

Hello,

I am the user that made these changes and would request that these be restored. My intent was not to cause disruption, but rather to document the current situation on OSM more accurately. I can provide some examples which may be informative.

I have been editing place names in Punjabi, which is a language which is written with two writing systems, Shahmukhi and Gurmukhi. Most Punjabi speakers are only able to read one or the other, so it is common practice to transliterate to have strings for both scripts. If we are saying transliteration is a problem as a rule, that would mean we are discouraging transliterations which allow people to read text in their own language which is clearly not something the OSM community would encourage.

Further, it may not be obvious what "duplicating" a translation is if they are unfamiliar with the scripts being used. Each Arabic-based script uses different rules, and what may look like a duplicate to some readers is actually a necessary clarification. Take for example Punjabi and Saraiki which have a character ݨ. In Urdu, this character is written the same as ن, which is also used in Punjabi and Saraiki. So the word پانی in Urdu may be represented by پاݨي in Punjabi Shahmukhi and Saraiki Shahmukhi because it includes a nasalized sound which has its own character in those languages. Now let's say we have کارنا. We have to write this as کرنا in Urdu, Punjabi, and Saraiki. This is because in this word, the sound is not the one which gets a different character in some other languages. The only way to record differences like this is with multiple strings, but if editors think these are "duplicates" instead of indicating different information about how the word is pronounced for each language, then we are losing information. It would not be appropriate to encourage this without a warning that unless you know about the writing systems of the other languages, you cannot know that the same letters mean the same thing just because they look the same.

Hopefully that clarifies why these updates are necessary. Cheers.



--
https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/bgo_eiu
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User:Bgo_eiu

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------- Original Message -------
On Monday, August 8th, 2022 at 8:30 AM, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:


> Hi,
>
> I have reverted a series of consecutive edits by user "Bgo eiu" to the
> "Names" page on the Wiki. I felt that these edits were, in their
> entirety, too far-reaching to be made without an explicit community
> consensus.
>
> The edits I have reverted include:
>
> * far-reaching changes to the "avoid transliterations" section,
> including changing the title to "avoid uninformed transliterations", and
> changing the logic from "transliterations are unwanted, except in some
> cases" to "transliterations are widely accepted and used, and only
> become an issue when uninformed or machine generated"
>
> * the removal of an explicit request to not add name:xx tags duplicating
> the original name tag
>
> I am not saying these edits were entirely wrong, I just felt they were
> too bold to be made without a discussion here.
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
> --
> Frederik Ramm ## eMail frederik at remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>
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