[Talk-us] Washington DC place node cleanup

[Minh Nguyen]

Vào lúc 03:01 2020-12-04, Frederik Ramm đã viết:
> 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

Most of these localized names were added in changeset 76520412 [1] based 
on labels on the associated Wikidata item. [2] So this time it was not a 
case of promoting a particular minority language. In fact, I don't think 
much attention was paid to the names being added, or perhaps the Tajik 
name would've remained to the effect of "Washington District of 
Columbia" instead of being changed to "Washington (city)".

This same changeset changed the name of the District of Columbia 
relation to "Washington, D.C." in many languages, including English. [3] 
This results in Nominatim returning results like "Washington, D.C., 
Washington, D.C." I think it was inappropriate to rename the district 
this way. I think it was another oversight on the part of the 
changeset's author, because Wikidata has a distinct entity for the 
district. [4]

[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/76520412
[2] https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q61
[3] https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/162069
[4] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3551781

> 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 ;)

As others have pointed out, a local would refer to the city as "D.C." 
even while acknowledging that the city's formal written name is 
"Washington" or "Washington, D.C." I think common sense would require us 
to relegate "D.C." to loc_name or short_name, just as a general-purpose, 
global map would only shorten San Francisco to the local shorthand 
"S.F." and Salt Lake City to "SLC" when space is at a premium.

Thanks in part to the D.C.-based Voice of America, I'm sure you could 
find a local to get the translated name of Washington, D.C., for many 
languages, but I'm not confident they would choose the same names as 
Wikidata.

For example, both VOA and the local Vietnamese media still generally 
call the city "Hoa Thịnh Đốn", a relic of the early 20th century when 
Vietnamese still borrowed Chinese characters for world-class cities. 
"Hoa Thịnh Đốn" is easy for a Vietnamese speaker to pronounce, but it 
only kind of sounds like "Washington" in the way that an eggcorn sounds 
like its original phrase. It's archaic and probably unknown to the 
younger generation in Vietnam. The Vietnamese government prefers the 
phonetic respelling "Oa-sinh-tơn", which conversely is unknown to older 
Vietnamese Americans.

When I originally tagged the D.C. node with Vietnamese names in 
changeset 5439052, I intended for the fallback to be "Washington", as a 
compromise between the traditional and more modern names. But I 
hesitated to explicitly tag name:vi=Washington because it's incompatible 
with the Vietnamese alphabet. I guess I should've added it as a bulwark 
against armchair linguistics. Changeset 76520412 set name:vi to 
"Washington, D.C.", which to a Vietnamese speaker is rather like 
labeling New Orleans as "New Orleans, LA" on a map.

Long story short, I find changeset 76520412 to be problematic in the 
languages I know, let alone the many languages I don't. Thanks for 
bringing it to our attention.

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us