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

[Pierre-Léo Bourbonnais]

I support the non-abbreviated name paradigm. It is way easier to abbreviate a full name than the opposite. I am currently trying to get a standardized list of all addresses for the QC province and in the process, I will try to remove abbreviations in any street name tag on OSM (and also add alt_name tags when the Canada Post street name is different from the official/landrole name). I am not going to do so for the whole of Canada though, yours to decide.

I can give you a very good example of why we should not abbreviate orientations:

In Quebec, most streets are in french, so you get something like this : "Henri-Bourassa Est” But in some part of Quebec and in other provinces, it would be “Henri-Bourassa East”. So if the name tag gives you “Henri-Bourassa E”, how could you know, without knowing the official language of the municipality, that the name should be in french or in english? I can tell you that this is really annoying especially in bilingual suburbs and cities (same problem with north, south and north-east, south-east). And I’m not even talking about the multiple ambiguous abbreviations for range (rg), rang (also rg?), circle (cir), circuit (also cir?), terrace (terr), terrasse (also terr?), etc.

> On Dec 15, 2022, at 9:15 AM, Martin Chalifoux via Talk-ca <talk-ca at openstreetmap.org> wrote:
>
> For what it’ s worth, I second that position. I see no argument in support of keeping abbreviations that have not been made, hence considered, before the OSM guidance was established and yet it was decided it is preferable to avoid abbreviations in name tags. It is not very productive to just rehash old debates because some would prefer to have it otherwise. I see nothing new that could warrant changing the guidance. Consistency in the data is important. Maps are mostly produced by local users, but not exclusively for local users consumption. A presentation/format that speaks to all is valuable.
>
> My two cents.
>
> Have a good day, Martin.
>
>> On Dec 15, 2022, at 2:42 AM, Paul Norman <paul at paulnorman.ca> wrote:
>>
>> On 2022-12-12 8:42 p.m., Brian M. Sperlongano wrote:
>>
>>> On Mon, Dec 12, 2022 at 11:34 PM Michael Stark <michael60634 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>>
>>>> I usually see the quadrant written as "NW". That would be on road signs, written addresses, other maps, on Wikipedia, in real estate listings, etc.
>>>
>>> Correct, and this is also true in other quadrant-divided cities such as Washington, DC. Despite the fact that this is abbreviated on signs, the OSM convention (that data consumers of all stripes expect) is for the abbreviations to be spelled out in full.
>>>
>>> In all other parts of the world with quadrant suffixes -- like Washington -- that quadrant suffix of "NW" would be expanded to "Northwest".
>>>
>>> In other words, the abbreviation scheme used in Calgary is apparently different from that of the rest of the world. All we are asking here is for the Calgary mapping community to explain why they have chosen to apply a different tagging style from the global norm, to describe what that tagging scheme is, and to publicly document those conventions.
>>
>> I believe Calgary's quadrants should be expanded, in accordance with standard OSM practice. This is not something where each country makes its own decisions - we're a global project here, and there's nothing unique to Calgary that isn't present in other English-speaking regions with quadrants.
>>
>> One fact I find particularly compelling in establishing that there is not some unusual rare exception to how things work elsewhere is the fact that people in this thread have established that the unabbreviated form is commonly used verbally.
>>
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