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

[Jarek Piórkowski]

On Fri, Dec 16, 2022, at 02:33, Minh Nguyen wrote:
> Vào lúc 19:10 2022-12-15, Jarek Piórkowski đã viết:
> > Is the suggestion seriously to use a dataset put together by the federal 
> > government to override provincial and local norms, because some 
> > non-local mappers 3000 km away think that's more correct?
> > 
> > Can anyone think of community issues, political issues, or for that 
> > matter even practical issues with this suggestion?
> 
> Setting aside the issue of local autonomy,

That's quite the setting aside!

> none the sources that have 
> been cited so far in this discussion seems like a smoking gun to me, 
> whether the street signs or the NRN dataset.

So might it make sense to defer to local mappers, who are best positioned to know what the locally used names and formatting are?

> Looking for patterns on 
> signs or in a dataset, we can identify a prevailing written *style*. 
> However, the global abbreviation guideline was always about ignoring a 
> particular style in favor of disambiguation while retaining correct 
> spelling.

Yes, and so the question is whether writing out "Northwest" is correct, with several local mappers (and a decade of local mapping practice) indicating it's not.

> ... That's why I tried to ground this 
> discussion with information on the practical impact of either choice 
> when OSM data finds its way into data consumers. The OSM ecosystem is 
> not the same as the environment for which the signs or the NRN were 
> designed; we have different constraints.

And that's appreciated. But please appreciate that local mappers might take in the information about the practical impact on OSM data consumers, and decide that it doesn't warrant overriding local practices.

OSM data consumers would surely have an easier time if everything in the real world was standardized. If every NW was a Northwest, every St. Clair was a Saint Clair, and vice versa. If they didn't have to deal with non-English glyphs or languages to make a map of North America. But the real world still exists.

> ... For whatever 
> reason, American English developed differently. Here, "St." is 
> universally regarded as an abbreviation of "Saint", no different than 
> "Rev." as an abbreviation of "Reverend", except when it forms part of a 
> surname. You'll hardly find a sign in the Missouri city that spells out 
> "Saint Louis". Laypeople from near and far would consider it to be 
> needlessly pedantic and contrarian, but not incorrect.

A contrarian and somewhat tongue-in-cheek view: this pedantry is actually creating extra work for OSM data consumers. If a consumer wants to produce a visual map which will not be perceived as "pedantic" by most viewers, and thus wants to use "St. Louis" for the Missouri city, they will have to use a lookup table of city names as they are normally used. (Of course, they can't abbreviate _all_ "Saint"s in city names, because there's city names that are incorrect to abbreviate, like Saint John.) So if you are concerned about the workload of OSM data consumers and want to do something about it, you could do worse than using St. Louis as most people do ;)

--Jarek
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