[Talk-GB] Phone numbers in little England

[Oliver Jowett]

On Thu, Aug 22, 2013 at 9:01 AM, OpenStreetmap HADW <osmhadw at gmail.com>wrote:

> On 22 August 2013 08:43, Oliver Jowett <oliver.jowett at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> >> - no delimiter (+442079460676)
> >> - misplaced delimiter (+44 207 946 0676)
> >
> >
> > Aren't these unambiguous already?
> >
>
> They breach the existing guidelines, which call for the (UK usage)
> area code to be delimited.  In particular, in London, you can dial
> this number as 00442079460676, 02079460676 or 79460676.  On the other
> hand, dialing it as 9460676 will fail.  (Always assuming it weren't a
> bogus number for drama  use.)
>
> In any case, about 90% of people who used international format seemed
> to agree that +44 20 7946 0676 was the right grouping, even if some of
> them added the (0).
>

My point is that in this case, it's unambiguous what the fully-qualified
number means, regardless of where the spaces fall, so the edit is not
actually adding anything other than a particular display format. Isn't that
a policy to impose in the frontend that presents the data, not in the data
itself?

In the case of numbers such as 79460676, they suffer from ambiguity as you
need to know some extra information (country code, area code, etc) to be
able to produce a globally-unique number - so fixing those is a good plan.

Oliver
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