[OSM-talk] [OSM-newbies] avoid repeating the name tag twice

[Ben Laenen]

On Tuesday 05 May 2009, Emilie Laffray wrote:
> > What might be interesting and worth a discussion: A tag to describe
> > the default language of this object, e.g. "language=en". This could
> > als be several tags, e.g.
> > name=België - Belgique - Belgien
> > name:nl=België
> > name:fr=Belgique
> > name:da=Belgien
> > (and some more)
> > language=nl;fr;da    <- this would be new
> > (I hope I got the languages right, sorry if not)

It should be "de" for German, but anyway.

> I like the idea of the language element. I would like to add an extra
> precision in this case. I think the order of language should be by
> importance.
> Unfortunately, in this case namely the country, it is something
> highly political to even consider an order. But, in the case of a
> town located in the French speaking part, it would be logical to put
> something like fr;nl;da instead of nl;fr;da. The reverse would be
> true.

It's not really like that. In most of the country there's only one 
single official language. It's only a problem if you take the country 
as a whole, or look at Brussels:

For the country name, it's just ordered according to number of people in 
each language community currently. Not exactly a controversial way of 
tagging.

Brussels, which is officially bilingual French and Dutch, is a different 
beast. While it's uncontested that French is spoken more there, it's a 
real political minefield and one has to be careful to keep the two 
languages on par. Speaking of one language being "more important" than 
the other could easily provoke lively discussions or even edit-wars. 
But luckily we didn't have anything like that in OSM in Belgium yet and 
everyone is just tagging the French and Dutch names in the order they 
like in the name tag. But if we're going to add a tag that defines an 
order of importance, that can easily change. If it's possible at all to 
define an order, because while overall French is spoken more in 
Brussels, there are certainly areas with more Dutch speakers.

So, in short: I'm not sure a "language" tag would work here. The 
languages should be known from the political entity it's located in, 
and since the places in areas with more than one official language are 
tagged with name:nl, name:fr etc, that's more than enough already, and 
a language tag gives unnecessary information. And it's especially a bad 
idea if it defines a certain order of importance.

Ben