[OSM-talk] disputed territories

[Gervase Markham]

Tony Bowden wrote:
> 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'.

OK. So something like "the name used by most senior governing body with 
effective control of an area".

> If we're looking for other examples to ensure we come up with something
> that works more widely, Kosovo/Kosova is another interesting case, where
> "control" means something different again.

I don't know what the issues are there.

> That one isn't just academic either. Under "What needs to be done?"
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/WikiProject_Kosovo notes:
> 
>   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.

Well, presumably they can go ahead and add all the names they like with 
language tags on? It's just a question about what the untagged version 
has, i.e. what renders by default.

Doing that would allow them to do a backend change to copy all of one or 
the other into the untagged "name" once a decision had been made.

Gerv