[Talk-us] Washington DC place node cleanup

[Kevin Kenny]

Native en-US speaker here.

The city of Washington and the District of Columbia are coterminous.
Toponyms such as 'Georgetown', 'Anacostial', 'University Heights', refer to
neighbourhoods within the city.

It's quite common in the US to say, 'D.C.' when talking about the city -
perhaps even commoner than saying 'Washington'.  There are many contexts in
which the city and state of Washington introduce an ambiguity, so it's also
pretty common to say, 'Washington State' if context doesn't make it clear
that the state is what's intended.

The full name, 'District of Columbia', is almost never used colloquially;
it's always abbreviated when speaking.



On Fri, Dec 4, 2020 at 6:04 AM Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> when reverting an edit this morning I noticed that the node for
> Washington (https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/158368533) has myriad
> name:xx tags, many of which seem to be some variant of "Washington D.C."
> (with or without commas or dots), whereas the "local" name seems to be
> just Washington, without the D.C.
>
> As a native speaker of German I can assure you that we don't call the US
> capital "Washington D.C." as the name:de tag claims; I would assume that
> it is similar for most other languages. The German-language OSM map at
> https://www.openstreetmap.de/karte.html?zoom=10&lat=38.70174&lon=-76.93764
> has a mechanism where it displays the German name and then, if the local
> name is different, the local name below; since the German name
> "Washington D.C." and the local name "Washington" are different, this
> leads to a somewhat funny display (whereas the logic works ok for other
> US cities).
>
> I could of course fix the German name but I think that it might need a
> more thorough review and I don't feel competent for that.
>
> Two name tags (and this is checking only those that use Roman letters)
> look like they might be entirely wrong and refer to the District of
> Columbia only:
>
> name:lfn=Distrito de Columbia
> name:mi=Takiwā o Columbia
>
> Then again, I've heard people say "I was in D.C." and mean the city, so
> perhaps that *is* a legitimate name for the city? Maybe someone in the
> US community wants to have a look and do this right.
>
> It is a bit of a conundrum in OSM - we usually say that local knowledge
> tops everything, but then again for many of the languages there might
> not even *be* a local Washington mapper in OSM ;)
>
> Bye
> Frederik
>
> --
> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>
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-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
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