[Tagging] International and UN names

[Colin Smale]

I have several friends who work at in UN agencies and my wife worked there as well for several years. They are most particular about spelling and language. Every word has an official spelling and there are not normally alternatives. In English, it's a mixture of what we would call "British" and "American" spellings. Any document, including e-mails, that contains a "spelling error" according to UN standards is very much frowned upon. In theory it could trigger a kind of "international incident". It's done so they can say they don't follow the convention of country X (and therefore put that country on a higher footing than country Y).

As the UN stands above any individual country, and has its own linguistic conventions, in my eyes it would be entirely appropriate to treat "UN" syntactically as a country in the accepted locale syntax: so name:fr-UN=Kyïv for example. This is to be interpreted in the normal way as "the name in French as it is used in the UN".

Surely the discussion should not be whether "we" will "allow" UN spelling variants in OSM? Of course we will. The discussion should be framed constructively - about "how" to represent them in tags.

> On 03/15/2022 3:56 PM Marc_marc <marc_marc at mailo.com> wrote:
> 
>  
> Le 15.03.22 à 15:27, Michael Montani a écrit :
> > the mispelling of some names
> 
> no need for a tag to fix mispelling :)
> 
> >   *   The French spelling of Kyiv (name:fr in OSM) should be Kyïv
> >     according to the note (which could be name:fr-UN=Kyïv , possibly
> >     different from common usage for a francophone user)
> 
> I'm a "native francophone user" and Kyïv are very strange to me for a 
> name in french.
> I never read that spelling and according to fr.wikipedia, is a ukrainian 
> name that gave name:fr=Kyiv
> 
> but if you have a valid source (including if you think that the UN 
> decision could be source=knownledge), i have no issue seeing you to add 
> int_name:fr=Kyïv
> imho it's much better than name:UN:en=Kyïv name:wikipedia:en=Kiev 
> name:MARC:fr=Kiev name:ANOTHER:fr=foo name:DB42=bar
> 
> I don't find it appropriate to use osm to fill in all the name variants 
> according to all the existing databases in the world.
> wikidata is made to link the databases together
> 
> 
> 
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