[OSM-talk] disputed territories

[William Waites]

On Thu, Dec 13, 2007 at 10:39:02PM +1300, Tony Bowden wrote:
> 
>   Decide what language should be used for names on the map (Serbian or
>   Albanian). This is a highly political decision, so I am not adding any
>   names until some policy has been agreed upon.

Perhaps there should be no such thing as "names on the map", rather
names should be rendered depending according to the language requested
by the user. If a user's client is set to Serbian, they should get
KOSOVO (or KOCOBO (ersatz cyrillic) depending on character set) if in
Albanian then they see KOSOVA.

If the user's client requests something other than the local language
they may get the rendering in their language (MOSCOW as opposed to
MOCKBA) or a default. Any contentiousness is moved to the choice of the
default.

> That sounds plausible, as long as it's clear what "control" means. In
> the L/Derry case, day to day government is in the hands of Derry City
> Council[1], whose official position is that the city is called 'Derry'.
> The January 2007 ruling was them failing to have that recognised at the
> level of national government, where it is still officially called
> 'Londonderry'.

It might be argued that this is a case of dialect and in one dialect of
English it is called Derry and in another it is called Londonderry. But
this is finer grained than the usual internationalization frameworks and
concepts might support.

What about the case where there are multiple official names in multiple
offical languages (ALICANTE and ALACANT, Castellano and Valeciano are
both correct and official, official documents tending to have both)?

Just some thoughts...

Cheers,
-w