[Talk-ca] Canadian_best_practices: bilingual

[Richard Weait]

On Wed, May 12, 2010 at 9:44 PM, john whelan <jwhelan0112 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I've put in what I think might be useful to newcomers about what data to
> enter and why.
>
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_Canada#Canadian_best_practices
>
> Perhaps some one could look through it and comment or amend.

Are there bilingual road signs in Ottawa?  If a sign said "Promenade
Wilkie Drive" I'd use

name=Promenade Wilkie Drive
name:en=Wilkie Drive
name:fr=Promenade Wilkie

Other examples are Federal buildings, which even here in Toronto have
bilingual signs.  The Parliament Buildings in Ottawa are named as

name=Parlement du Canada / Parliament of Canada
name:en=Parliament of Canada
name:fr=Parlement du Canada

Bilingual maps are a recent interest of mine.  I have a French
language OSM now running in-house here.

One thing I notice is that while rendering the World with name:fr,
Quebec and France are almost empty!  They use name, as they should but
not also name:fr.  The same is true of name:en and probably many other
languages.  It looks a bit funny to see Edimbourg, Londres and
Copenhague, but Paris is missing!

This is not insurmountable.  It is possible to preferentially show
name:fr and fall back to name if name:fr is empty.  It even possible
to default to name in Quebec, and use name:fr elsewhere and either
fall back, or not.  And I suppose I would make each of these rendering
choices, depending on whether I want to show a lot of names, or
emphasize missing data with blank spaces (to encourage updates).

Thoughts?