[Talk-us] Change sets covering entire US?

[Mike Thompson]

On Tue, Nov 9, 2021 at 8:55 AM Mateusz Konieczny via Talk-us <
talk-us at openstreetmap.org> wrote:

>
>
>
> Nov 8, 2021, 18:07 by zelonewolf at gmail.com:
>
>
>
> On Mon, Nov 8, 2021 at 11:49 AM Mateusz Konieczny via Talk-us <
> talk-us at openstreetmap.org> wrote:
>
>
> Nov 8, 2021, 13:18 by zelonewolf at gmail.com:
>
> I don't have a problem with the large size of the bounding box, as it is
> clear from the changeset description what the change is, and it is
> topically consistent (i.e. - it's not a changeset with a park in New York,
> an ice cream shop in Albuquerque, and a river in St. Louis!).
>
> I *DO* have a problem with the change itself, as name:en is redundant when
> the name is already in English.  The data consumers that I'm familiar with
> (namely, OpenMapTiles, and my own service) that are tasked with extracting
> names in English are perfectly capable of looking for name:en first, and
> then falling back to name if name:en is not present.  So IMO, this is tag
> bloat.  I have added a changeset comment requesting an explanation for the
> change and will link to this discussion.
>
> It is not really redundant as soon as you make a bit more interesting name
> display.
>
> if someone would want to display names in English but in case of English
> name being
> unavailable, show German name (which would be preferred over say "京市北")
>
>
> That's a reasonable use case that I hadn't considered.  It does still feel
> a bit redundant but I can accept that explanation.  It is probably worth
> adding a revision to the name=* wiki page expressing this.
>
> It is already, in fact I added this already as usefulness of this info is
> quite surprising.
>
> For example it surprised me when I initially implemented this fallback and
> started getting German names for cities in Poland (typical case of
> software doing
> what instructed, not what intended).
>
> So I am not surprised that it is not known more widely.
>
>
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Names#Repeating_name_with_language_specific_tag
>
> Feel free to edit it if something is poorly written there, maybe it should
> be also qualified
> that such explicit language tagging is not fully accepted.
>
I still do not see the value in this mechanical edit which, as I understand
it, simply copied the value of the name tag to name:en for all of the
cities in the US. If necessary the data user/consumer could have done the
same thing.  Now, if there was an individual case where name was not equal
to name:en, and the mapper had knowledge of this and/or researched it, and
then made that specific edit, I can see value in that. Of course, if any
such cases exist, they have now been obscured by this mechanical edit which
implies "yes, someone verified that name and name:en are the same."

Mike
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