[OSM-talk] Relevance of the “name” tag in places where there is no obvious associated language

[Maarten Deen]

On 2019-12-06 11:46, Martin Constantino–Bodin wrote:

>  Some context first.  So there has been this changeset that triggered
> some discussions: https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/77845837
> Changeset comments in not a great place for discussion, so I suggest
> that we continue here.  (Thanks @SomeoneElse for the link! ☺) First,

> The issue comes in places where there is not a particular language,
> like oceans, most seas, or places like Antartica.  In most of these
> places, the “name” tag is actually using the English name.
> 
> The issue is that English, despite being a de facto internal language,
> is felt by some communities as a non-neutral choice, given all the
> inequalities it yields among people in the world, given its
> complexity, etc.  The Esperanto community is particularly criticising
> the choice of the English language as an international language.

IMHO that is more a "he says, she says" argument than anything valid. To 
me it comes more across that a small community wants to push its own 
agenda.
That may be unfair because I don't know how big the Esperanto community 
is, so it is IMHO.

> The question I would like to ask is about the relevance of having a
> “name” tag in places where there is no default language—knowing
> that all the “name:en”, “name:eo”, etc. are already there.  I
> can imagine that some renderers might expect to always be a tag
> “name”, and I wonder how fixable this is (especially in the cases
> where there is a localised name).  If you have any argumented pointer
> about this, I would be interested.

Removing the name tag does not solve any problem. The renderer for the 
map (or any program that needs to display the name tag) needs to make a 
decision which tag to display. If the name tag is not present it will 
have to fall back to another one.
In cases where you are running a program on your computer, this decision 
might be easy: the language setting of your computer (like JOSM does). 
In cases where you make something for a general audience, that decision 
will not be so easy. Then you will get into this discussion about "what 
language is used most" or "we don't feel comfortable having an in our 
eyes non-neutral language pushed up to us".

I am biased. I don't know Esperanto. Therefore I would be against 
rendering everything that is not nation-specific in Esperanto.

> As far as I know, the wiki doesn’t state anything about English
> being the default language for the name tag:
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Names  It thus doesn’t feel like
> this question has already been discussed.  However, I never
> participated in the main OSM mailing list and thus missed any such
> discussions if they already took place.  If so, please give me an
> argumented link.

The problem arises out of one of the general OSM principles: use the 
name that is verifiable on the ground. This does not work well for 
oceans or any international body. No ocean has a sign affixed to it with 
its name (well, there might be signposts in different countries pointing 
to it).

So there is no real solution to it. Removing the name tag does not solve 
the problem because a renderer might choose to display name:en.
Changing the name tag to Esperanto does not solve the problem and doing 
that on a global scale I would also see as vandalism. Because why 
Esperanto? Is there a general consensus for that? That is how we operate 
on OSM.

Maybe the esperanto community can solve this by making their own Mapnik 
tiles and using their own www.openstreetmap.eo domain or using 
eo.openstreetmap.org. If they (or anyone else) want to look at the map 
with international names in Esperanto than it is there to use.
I for one would welcome something like that with all captions in latin 
script (like the public transport map, but in full Mapnik style).

Regards,
Maarten