[Talk-ca] What do I poutine the name tag of a road with a suffix?

[Brian M. Sperlongano]

O Canada,

I'm an American, and for that, I want to apologize in advance.  I am told
this is the best way to fit in up north.  I often edit in Canada.  There's
a lot to do!  After all, there is A LOT of Canada but few Canadians.
Imagine my surprise when editing water features in Canada, when I found
dozens of copies of Lake Nipissing[1]. Aside from being fun to pronounce,
it provided a lovely evening challenge to disentangle the various
overlapping Canvec water polygons.  Eventually, victory was achieved -
Nominatim now reports just one Lake Nipissing[2] in the database!  (It
turns out I missed a few when I did my big cleanup last year, so I quickly
cleaned up the remaining offenders in the minutes just before typing this
out.  For effect.)

When I launched my big lake cleanup effort last summer, I had to take a big
leap of faith and assume that there was no special mapping convention
unique to Canada that desired to have their lakes chopped up into a grid of
water squares or to have bits of the lake on land where there was no water,
or have 27 different water objects with the name "Lake Nipissing".  After
all, I was a stranger in this foreign land with terms foreign to my
American ears like "loonie", "toonie", and "universal health care."

I imagined perhaps that the local Lake Nipissing mapping community held
regular, in-person meetings at their favorite hangout, the Twiggs Coffee
Roasters in Sturgeon Falls[4], where they sat, gazing over the marina on
nearby Sturgeon River, contemplating how it might be mapped from a uniquely
Canadian viewpoint. "Squares, eh?" As an American, we didn't study Canada
in school, instead understanding that a great ice wall lay beyond our
northern border.  The bulk of my exposure to Canadian culture, and indeed I
can safely say that of most Americans, was the breakout performances of
John Candy and Dan Akroyd in the 1995 cult classic film "Canadian Bacon"[5].

Nonetheless, I deleted the loony imported and overlapping water squares and
waited for the angry hordes of Canadians to come streaming (virtually) over
the border to berate my hamfisted attempts to understand and apply the
local culture. Surprisingly, none came.

In the months since, I forgot about my fears of inadvertently tripping over
some heretofore unknown aspect of Canadian mapping culture. This ended
abruptly last week when I encountered the Great Calgary Road Suffix Fued of
2022:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/129765303

I was shocked.  In Calgary, suffixes on road names are not expanded!
Images of "Canadian Bacon" swirled in my head as I wracked my brain to try
to remember anything I could about Calgary that might help me understand
the cultural factors at play.  Sadly, again all I could come up with was
another John Candy standard, this time 1993's "Cool Runnings"[6].  Alas,
the tales of the 1988 Jamaican bobsled team would shine no light on this
dispute.  Since pop comedy films turned up no secrets, I fell back to that
old standard, the OSM wiki[7][8], to see what it might have to say.

We are at an impasse.  The wiki says to expand all abbreviations.  I
checked a few US examples[9][10] and found them in line with the wiki.  The
American president (the guy, not the excellent 1995 film starring Michael
Douglas) can rest assured that we hold his address accurately as
Pennsylvania Avenue Northwest.

So dear reader, if you've read this far, I applaud you, and will happily
pick up your tab should we ever find ourselves having coffee together in
Sturgeon Falls.  I leave this list with a few options they might consider:

1. Document the unusual tagging habits of the Calgary mapping community.
This will help resolve future disputes when mappers can check out the
relevant wiki articles and find the helpful words, "however, in Calgary,
Canada..." as well as calm the sensibilities of the citizen mappers of this
noble city.
2. Decide to spell the full road names out in their entirety.  This will
endlessly confuse those western Canucks, who will surely look quizically at
words like "South" and "Northwest", so tread carefully if this is the route
you decide to take.
3. Politely (is there any other way?) inform those silly foreigners like me
that Canada is just too raw, too wild, and too, well, _unusual_ for those
beyond its icy borders to map usefully and effectively.  Such conventions
are no doubt left for locals, and locals alone to possibly understand the
nuances of Canadian road naming.


[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/File:Lake_nipissing_errors.png
[2] https://www.openstreetmap.org/search?query=Lake%20Nipissing
[3] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/445116840
[4] https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1895040043
[5] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dDGkQiwh_qg
[6] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cCmp2qbrZUQ
[7] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Names
[8]
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Canada/Tagging_guidelines#Street_names
[9] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/305660797
[10] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/675221039
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