[OSM-talk] Revival: Multilingual Country-List

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 21 February 2013 13:29, Hans Schmidt <z0idberg at gmx.de> wrote:
> yes, I know that especially for African countries, this could get messy.
> There are many other examples where this would clearly give benefits,
> though. For problematic cases one could develop something special.

It gets messy in a lot of places in the world.

To pick just one example that I know well : Ireland has both English
and Irish names everywhere, but which one goes into the "name" tag can
be very tricky to figure out. There are a few areas of Ireland where
the Irish name is the dominant one, but the boundaries are fuzzy and
osm doesn't have a relation for them. Some places use an Irish name in
an English-dominated area, and vice-versa. There's even a town that
uses English for its name, but Irish for the name of its train
station.

It's just too messy, I do not see how defining a default language for
a region could deal with such cases. Remember that which language is
selected for the name tag is sometimes very contentious, and that it
gets sorted by the local mappers rather than by the sysadmin of some
mapnik server.

Besides, I actually think that adding the "redundant" name:XX tag is
actually simpler than modifying the code of many renderers to take
something completely new into account. On the other hand, it should be
very easy to check that "if a place has at least one name:xx tag, it
should also have one that matches the name tag" either inside the
editor or via a bot.

-- 
Vincent de Phily