[OSM-talk] disputed territories

[Tony Bowden]

Dave Stubbs wrote:
> The body with effective control is the one that is
> in charge of such naming in that area... you can't clarify it by
> trying to impose some sort of governmental structure as that won't
> work universally.

In the L/Derry case it's not quite that simple, however. (I have no axe
to grind about this particular case, by the way - it's just a convenient
example for the conversation).

Derry City Council, like most city councils throughout the UK I would
imagine, have authority for street naming within their district
(subject, IIRC, to a lack of objections from the Royal Mail).

I am unsure where the authority lies within the UK for naming of
villages and towns (if anyone can point me at anything about this, it
would be appreciated as I've become rather curious about all this now!)

For cities, however, things are more complicated, in that the creating
of cities (which by definition includes declaring their initial name as
a city), still happens in the UK only by Royal Charter. Constitutionally
I'm not sure of the status of this, but in the reports of the creation
of five new UK cities to celebrate the Queen's Golden Jubilee a few
years it was claimed that the Queen herself had made the final decision
out of the shortlist offered by the government (and implied that this
was also true for very few other places granted city status in the
previous century).

Where the power then lies to *change* the name of a city is also
slightly unclear. The judgment in the Judicial Review of L/Derry naming
case, sets out a distinction that seems to has never been made explicit
in law before: that the name of a city, per se, is not necessarily the
same as the name of the local government district that the city
comprises. So when the district was renamed from Londonderry to Derry in
1984, "the district was a borough and the borough a city [so] the
description of the council became ity Council". However, changing the
name of the city as district did not have the effect of changing the
name of the city as city - that requires submitting "a Petition ... to
Her Majesty in Council".  (Without claiming that the judgment is in any
way flawed, it should be pointed out, of course, that this is just a
judicial review, and in no way binding or precedent setting)

Which brings us back to the question at hand.

We have a situation where two names are in common usage for a city.
Local government refers to the city as "Derry" (and has now petitioned
the Queen to change the name to that), whereas National government
refers to the city as "Londonderry". Both names are used by the people
who live there. Unlike some of the other examples where being able to
detect language settings or the like might provide us a way to deliver
different default renderings, this one seems to require a policy
decision as which should be the default. That comes in two halves: (a)
is there a default rule or guideline (prefer local? prefer national?)
and (b) should that rule/guideline apply in this specific case?

Tony