[OSM-talk] "As on ground" country names

[Dave Stubbs]

On Jan 9, 2008 4:22 PM, Michael Collinson <mike at ayeltd.biz> wrote:
> At 03:06 PM 1/9/2008, Stefan Baebler wrote:
> >Hi!
> >
> >I'd imagine that OSM's "as on ground" rule for primary names should
> >also apply for country nodes (tagged with place=country), however this
> >doesn't seem to be the case at the moment.
> >http://osmxapi.hypercube.telascience.org/api/0.5/node%5bplace=country%5d
> >shows that primary names are english names for most of the countries.
> >
> >Any thoughts?
> >Do we bend the rule here in favor of english over local name?
> >How about multilingual countries (eg. Switzerland)
>
> The main use at the moment will be for the "international generic
> map" that OSM hosts directly (as 80n writes) but more will come.
>
> I suggest therefore for the moment that the default name should
> English, repeated as name:en and (at least) the name(s) of the
> country in its own language(s) and script be entered using the ISO
> 639-1  [1] language namespace tag:
>

I'd suggest keeping the exact same philosophy as used everywhere else.
If you want a generalised english map at the top layer, then just
rejig the renderer to use the name:en tag. There aren't that many
countries so it shouldn't be too hard to ensure they all have an :en
tag. And that way we're not special-casing data entry.