[Talk-GB] Edits in Wales

[Chris Jones]

On 11/08/17 09:37, Richard Fairhurst wrote:
>> We need to find a solution to this problem.
> It's not necessarily proven that we do. Welsh OSM users created the first
> non-English language OSM map back in 2008 (Chris Jones's cyosm rendering).
>
> In my (extensive) travels in Wales, it seems increasingly frequent that the
> Welsh-language street name is either the sole name or the top name of street
> signs in Welsh-speaking areas such as Aber and the Llyn, and not written at
> all in predominantly English areas such as most of the South. Aber is
> historically a hotbed of Welsh activism and rightly so, but showing a "Welsh
> / English" split in (say) Newport, Gwent, would seem ridiculous to locals
> and visitors alike.
>
> Because British signage and naming is erratic - we don't have a canonical,
> open, officially mandated list of place and street names like some other
> countries do - it's not uncommon to find a situation where one end of the
> street might be signposted "Heol y Mor [linebreak] Sea Road" and the other
> simply "Heol y Mor". Or where a sign might be in one language, but the road
> known universally by locals in another. Applying an arbitrary rule in these
> situations will not result in the map that makes most sense to most people
> or that best reflects local culture.
>
> I would rather follow a locally evolved consensus than unthinkingly apply an
> international wiki-mandated hack everywhere (and let's be clear, putting two
> values in one field with an arbitrary ASCII character as a separator is a
> hack). Newport is no more "Newport / Casnewydd" than Dolgellau is "Dolgellau
> / Dolgelley", even though both have Welsh and English names and both are in
> a country where the Welsh Language Act applies. Miguel, I'm sure you have
> good intentions and it's great to see your work, but using an Overpass query
> to enforce a wiki guideline then uploading it with Level0 is pretty much the
> canonical opposite of how we build the map in the UK. ;)
>
> The wiki documents but does not dictate, and it does not trump precedent.
> There is a lot of inconsistent nonsense on the wiki: it's not the gospel
> truth for OSM.
>
> Richard
Richard you've pretty much perfectly reflected my view here.

By all means add name:en and name:cy tags, but don't enforce your (or
whoever wrote the section on the wiki) opinions on which is best to use
in the name tag if something is already there. (Unless you posses real
local knowledge and disagree in which case engage with others and
attempt to reach consensus)

To my mind, as someone who's been living and mapping in Wales for over
10 years, The name tag should be used for whatever the local population
use, if you don't know that fall back to the top name on the signage
(where that exists).

The spirit of the Welsh Language Act is to give both languages equal
prominence. Far too many people think this means you must produce
confusing and ugly things that concatenate both languages and are harder
to read and use in both languages.

It doesn't.

It means providing an equal option for a welsh speaker to use the map
(and data) in Welsh if that is their wish. This is what I was attempting
to start down the path of with the long broken cyosm render.

For OSM that would mean translating the website/interface, providing a
localised render (like cyosm did), and improving the name:cy coverage.
It does not mean shoving both English and Welsh version in the same name
tag to everybody's detriment.

--
Chris