[Talk-nz] Dual names (Was: Place names (OSM wiki entry))

[Andrew Davidson]

On 20/11/21 14:17, Eliot Blennerhassett wrote:
> On 11/11/21 18:37, Eliot Blennerhassett wrote:
>> Lets hash out the details here 
>> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:New_Zealand/Place_names

The dual name tagging that you've adopted in NZ doesn't make sense to 
me. If you tag something with name in more than one language ie:

name= Something
name:<lg>= Something else

then the value in the name tag should appear at least once in the 
name:<lg> tags. See https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Multilingual_names.

So:

name="Lake Ellesmere / Te Waihora"
name:en="Lake Ellesmere"
name:mi="Te Waihora"

is saying that the name is not used in English or Māori. A more extreme 
version of this is https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/556706 which 
implies that the name of your country is not used in any of the 199 
language variants tagged.

So you can say alt_name:en and alt_name:mi or old_name:en and 
old_name:mi, but the name has to be used in at least one language (by 
definition otherwise it cannot be the name).