[OSM-talk] Transcription and 'internationalization' in place names

[Andrew Errington]

On Mon, 16 Apr 2012 21:40:40 Joseph Reeves wrote:
>  >We should really not follow the approach of making the map at
>
> www.openstreetmap.org perfect but instead the data >behind it because
> that's where we're better than Google and Co.
>
> Agreed, but if we improve the rendering at osm.org, we should be able to
> highlight the issue that some users are filling the database with nonsense
> names. At the same time, the people that want to see "name= (name:en=)" on
> their osm.org tiles will be able to.
>
> Once the rendering is tweaked to give the results people want, the data
> would be presumably cleaned up quite quickly.

Absolutely!  And I think that this particular issue could be cleaned up 
automatically by a 'bot, with an exception report sent to the 
country-specific talk mailing list for anything that needs to be handled 
manually.

The reason that Japan and Korea have bilingual labels is because mappers want 
it that way.  Since Mapnik did not provide it, they did it themselves.  Now 
newer software is capable of doing automatically, so we should revisit the 
issue.

Should I simply open a ticket on Mapnik's issue tracker, to request that in 
Korea, labels be rendered as "name:ko (name:en)"?

On a related note, and using Claudius's example:

name=서울특별시
name:el=Σεούλ
name:en=Seoul
name:ko_rm=Seoulteukbyeolsi
name:ru=Сеул

Should we add name:ko=서울특별시?

Otherwise, how do we know the Korean name for this city?

Best wishes,

Andrew