[OSM-talk-be] Names of Arrondissements

[Sander Deryckere]

I would like to discuss the naming of the arrondissements in Belgium.

Currently, the ones I added (in West-Flanders) are the only ones with a
name like "Arrondissement Roeselare", a big part of the others don't exist
yet, but they have a name like "Antwerpen". I'm all in favour of uniform
names, but I want to clarify my choice for including "Arrondissement" in
the name.


   1. When people refer to "Antwerpen", they might mean the province or the
   city, but never the arrondissement. If they mean the arrondissement, that's
   always mentioned. And I believe that the name tag should reflect what
   people use to refer to the object.
   2. This is also in the choice of the names of Wikipedia articles: They
   name the articles Antwerpen
(stad)<https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antwerpen_%28stad%29>and
Antwerpen
   (provincie) <https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antwerpen_%28provincie%29>,
   so the appended (stad) or (provincie) is just a clarification. But the
   article of the arrondissement gets the name Arrondissement
Antwerpen<https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arrondissement_Antwerpen>which
means it's part of the name.
   3. We can't expect non-OSM members to learn the mapping of the different
   admin_levels. So if someone searches the Kerkstraat in Brugge, and they
   return with a result of the Kerkstraat in Heist inside Brugge, they could
   wrongly think that they have the right street. While if the result would
   show the Kerkstraat is in Heist, arrondissement Brugge, the user might know
   it's wrong.
   4. Some people want to index the streets per city (to have a quicker
   search). Because other countries use different admin_levels for their city
   boundaries, the only current way is searching the city node and the
   boundary that goes with it by the name tag. By using the city name for the
   arrondissements, these tools could get confused. (this last part is mainly
   the fault of Germany, where different admin_levels are used for different
   importance of cities). This also makes that Nominatim can't automatically
   add "Arrondissement" to make the search result of #3 more clear.


Off coarse, setting the name to "Arrondissement Antwerpen" also makes the
life of the mapper a bit easier (it's easier to browse through the
different boundary relations), but this is of lesser importance than having
the right data.

I have also made a little vote on the wiki:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:WikiProject_Belgium/Boundaries#Arrondissement_names

If you don't like discussions, or your opinion is fixed, you can cast your
vote.
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