[OSM-talk] [Maps-l] Announcemen: Multilingual Country-List

[Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason]

On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 11:53 PM, Peter Körner<osm-lists at mazdermind.de> wrote:
> Ævar Arnfjörð Bjarmason schrieb:
>> On Wed, Aug 12, 2009 at 11:28 PM, Peter Körner<osm-lists at mazdermind.de> wrote:
>>> Hello OSM folks
>>>
>>> For the integration of osm into the wikipedia there will be localized
>>> maps in all languages that have their own wikipedia. The problem is,
>>> that a lot of countries are not translated yet.
>>>
>>> To get an overview over the status and make translating those countries
>>> more easy, I created a tool that can be found at
>>>
>>>   http://cassini.toolserver.org/~mazder/multilingual-country-list/
>>>
>>> I'd like to encourage everyone to spend some time making translated maps
>>> better. Comments welcome!
>>
>> That's very useful, and it's nice to see the toolserver being put to good use.
>>
>> One thing that would be very useful is if you would offer a .osm file
>> for download which would include all the place=country nodes so that
>> one could mass-translate them in e.g. JOSM. You can do this making an
>> OSM file whose contents are a concatenation of the various
>> http://api.openstreetmap.org/api/0.6/node/ID where ID is the node ID.
>>
>
> I also thought about implementing inline-editing by just clicking the
> wrongly translated name and do the commit to the api right from the
> Toolserver. This way also the MySQL-DB behind the lists would be up2date
> instantly.

I think tools such as this one would be most useful if they do
directly commit to the API and offer an editing interface. As has been
pointed out (in the "i18n-rich areas on the map" thread on osm-talk)
the current editors for OSM data offer a very lousy interface if all
you're interested in is contributing translations, since they aren't
optimized for that at all.

So direct uploading would be nice, whether that happens with a single
dedicated bot user or through proxying of OSM user accounts (e.g. via
the still-to-be-merged oauth stuff) would certainly be nice.

> Don't you fear corrupt mass-imports as we got just some weeks ago? (see
> http://cassini.toolserver.org/~mazder/duplicate-countries/)

IIRC The corrupted mass-import happened because someone ran the
bulk_upload.py script on an OSM file without understanding how the
bulk-upload tool worked. Granted if you offered an OSM file with all
the place=country nodes you'd be morke likely to get that sort of (and
other kinds) of sillyness as a result.

I'd much rather see a click-through launchpad-like interface to
translate arbitrary objects :)