[OSM-talk] disputed territories

[Tony Bowden]

Gervase Markham wrote:
> This particular case is a very hard nut to crack. I'm hoping most cases 
> will be somewhat simpler :-)

I think that *most* cases will be simpler, but that we are going to
encounter lots of very tricky edge cases, as issues of naming, and, more
generally, of territory, are often not simple. Especially when there is
any sort of dispute involved.

Each of the last few places I've lived (Northern Ireland, Estonia, and
Macedonia) have significant issues in these areas; I don't know if I
just happen to have lived in particularly freakish places, or whether
that just makes me a little more attuned to the fact that these things
are never quite so simple anywhere as we might like!

(Actually, this even carries through into New Zealand, where I am
currently: Aotearoa is becoming much more commonplace worldwide as the
name of the country these days)

>  > 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".
> 
> That seems to me like an admission by the city that the official name is 
> currently Londonderry, however much they might wish it to be otherwise.

I don't see that. I see it as a request from one government (local) to
another (national) for _its_ official name to also be recognised by the
other, more akin to what happens when a country declares independence.

As an aside, have we given any thought to what should happen in those
cases? Even in the simplest cases it can take many months for a newly
formed country to gain recognition by even a majority of other
countries, and many never achieve it from everyone. At what point(s)
should we change the map in what way? (You'd think the web should be
quicker at such things than traditional media, but I was stunned earlier
this year, upon conducting a survey of many of the major ecommerce
sites, to discover that most still didn't list Montenegro as an
independent country one year on from independence. Almost all still have
"Serbia and Montenegro" as one entry. Some (eBay!) still have "Yugoslavia"!)

We should be wary of falling into a trap of thinking that any given
place has one and only one "official name". Even at a country level this
doesn't hold true. Macedonia, for example, has no official name at all
in many countries ("The former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia" is a
reference, not a name, used in the UN, and between countries that don't
all recognise the internal constitutional name of "The Republic of
Macedonia")  [for another weird edge case from the same region that
caused me some practical confusion earlier this year, the name of
Thessaloniki in English in Macedonia is "Solun"].

Map-making has always had a political element to it. I'm not advocating
we try to solve all these issues just now, but I do think more and more
of them will come to the fore as the project grows.

Tony