[OSM-talk] Revival: Multilingual Country-List

moltonel 3x Combo moltonel at gmail.com
Thu Feb 21 10:43:45 UTC 2013


> Hi
>
> I revived the Multilingual Country-List tool. Now with Overpass-API as
> source, it's a useful tool again. If you find the time, head over to
> <http://toolserver.org/~mazder/multilingual-country-list/> and look for
> your favorite language.

Nice :) I just wanted to point out a paragraph on the tool which IMHO
is bad advice :

> Sometimes the name of a country in the selected language (the value of the name:xx-Tag)
> is identical to the name of this country in the native language of this country (which is
> stored in the name-Tag). Because the content of the name-Tag is the natural fallback for
> a missing name:xx-Tag, in such a case there should be no name:xx-Tag for this language.
> But if there's one anyway, this duplicate tag is highlighted in orange. You may delete
> those name:xx-Tags without changing anything in the effective Name.

The recent multilingual map has demonstrated that it is actually *not*
ok to leave out the name:xx tag if it is identical to the name tag.

Consider this usecase :
* I prefer to read French but can also read English, so I set may
language priority to name:fr -> name:en -> name.
* I now take a look at a country like "Central African Republic" whose
local name is a French one.
* If the name:fr tag is present I get to see the French name.
* If the name:fr is removed, I get to see the English name, which is
acceptable but suboptimal.

So instead of saying that one "may delete the name:xx tag if it is
identical to the name tag" (to reduce bloat, presumably), the
multilingual-country-list should encourage to add the name:xx tag in
all cases.

-- 
Vincent de Phily

PS: newly registered to mailing-list, sorry if threading is messed-up.



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