[Talk-GB] Fwd: Re: Edits in Wales

Mon Aug 14 12:32:58 UTC 2017

I'm forwarding an email I sent only to Andy  by mistake yesterday.

--
🌍 Miguel Sevilla-Callejo
from my mobile 📱
---------- Mensaje reenviado ----------
De: "Andy Townsend" <ajt1047 at gmail.com>
Fecha: 13/8/2017 19:04
Asunto: Re: [Talk-GB] Edits in Wales
Para: <talk-gb at openstreetmap.org>
Cc:

On 11/08/2017 17:19, Brian Prangle wrote:
>
> ...  and goes to the first source of what is seen to be the authoritative
> source - the wiki- to seek guidance,
>
>
> Unfortunately, the wiki isn't always "the authoritative source".  Articles
> written there include both "descriptive" and "prescriptive" ones - saying
> how mappers currently map things, and telling them how they _should_ map
> things.  When it comes to "how to map things" often there needs to be a
> discussion, because no one person has the whole picture.  Sometimes people
> writing wiki articles take great care to represent the different views
> where they exist and try and thread a consensus course through them (Harry
> Wood please take a bow at this point); and sometimes they don't.
>
> For example, https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Sidewalks says that "The
> simplest method is to tag the associated highway with sidewalk
> <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:sidewalk>=both/left/right/no
> (none is sometimes used, but no is preferred
> <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:sidewalk>)", despite
> https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/sidewalk#values showing that
> "none" is the more popular value.  I tried to make the wiki reflect usage
> but it was immediately changed back because "The statement never
> described predominant usage, but preferred usage. That hasn't changed.".
> Clearly someone thinks that _they_ know better than me and the majority of
> sidewalk mappers in OSM.  Rather than "insisting" it is correct as per
> https://www.xkcd.com/386/ I decided that life was too short.  I suspect
> that something rather similar has happened with regard to language tagging
> in Wales.
>
> and then asks, from etiquette, what the local community thinks,
>
>
> To be fair, from reading the emails it doesn't read to me like that was
> what was happening; it reads very much like he was telling everyone that
> disagreed with him that they were wrong without offering any reasoning
> beyond "the wiki says...".
>
> Unfortunately every multiple-language situation is complicated (and with a
> DWG hat on I've been involved in quite a few).  Some communities (Belgium
> being a notable early example) have settled on a compound "name" that
> doesn't reflect any language name on the ground but is intended to indicate
> that both have equal value; some - possibly the majority, but not by much -
> go with name as the "most used value" - so "Eteläinen Rautatiekatu" rather
> than the rather large mouthful "Eteläinen Rautatiekatu / Södra
> Järnvägsgatan"* for the street in Helsinki that I used to stay when working
> there, despite all street signs being bilingual.  Some have gone for
> locally-relevant variations of both.  However it's always the wishes of the
> local mappers that should hold most sway (and, again from personal
> experience with a DWG hat on, that can get difficult when one community is
> under-represented in OSM).
>
> *Can this discussion  specifically address what is wrong with the wiki
> page on Welsh placenames
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Multilingual_names#Wales
> <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Multilingual_names#Wales> and suggest
> improvements?*
>
>
> I'd start by asking some more Welsh mappers!  So far we've had the person
> who created the original cyosm map arguing against a compound name, along
> with a number of (very) frequent visitors from England.  Other than the
> person who raised the issue we've not yet had much of a balancing
> population on the other side of the argument; but not everyone follows
> changeset discussion comments or this list.  When the status of Western
> Sahara was raised with the DWG I went through a fairly long process which
> started at https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?pid=602864#
> p602864 to ensure that everyone's views could be taken on board and to
> make sure that no-one was missed - I made sure that ever mapper in the
> region who'd recently mapped affected objects had a comment in a changeset
> discussion (and if no reply a direct message) in what appeared to be their
> usual language.  Contacting _every_ mapper who's mapped in Wales is
> unlikely to be feasible but contacting a subset of regular mappers (perhaps
> based edit count > a certain value) and based on some sort of "edits in
> Wales" criterion could be doable, but based on the Western Sahara survey
> I'd expect that it'd be a sizable amount of effort; just putting up a "web
> survey" form somewhere and hoping people come to it won't cut it.
>
> If after that sort of discussion there's still opposition to "compound
> names" in Wales I'd suggest that an initial change to the wiki page would
> be the removal of the section added by "Männedorf" in 2014
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Multilingual_names&type=
> revision&diff=1121276&oldid=1116200 that introduced the idea in the first
> place - but we need to make sure that people even know about the issue
> first.
>
> I'm also hoping that this discussion might kickstart OMSUK's Welsh
> language render project
>
>
> Well good luck with that :) https://www.loomio.org/d/
> P15nYvqg/getting-the-uk-map-going- seems to be somewhat moribund; maybe a
> specific language render get people to actually start doing something
> rather than suggesting "things that it would be cool to do"?  As I said in
> the loomio thread, if anyone wants any specific help about e.g. "how to do
> X with lua" (or even "what do I need to do to set up a server at Hetzner")
> let me know.
>
> Best Regards,
>
> Andy (for the avoidance of doubt, writing in an entirely personal capacity)
>
> * South(ern) Railway Street
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Talk-GB mailing list
> Talk-GB at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
>
>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/attachments/20170814/f58c447c/attachment.html>