[OSM-talk] nomoj de internaciaj objektoj / nazwy obiektów międzynarodowych ? names of international objects

[Martin Constantino–Bodin]

> I'd suggest using the 6 main United Nations languages for the "name=*"
> tag of Oceans and Continents: Arabic, Chinese, English, French,
> Russian and Spanish.

That would be very nice, actually. Although a bit redundant, as this 
information is already present in the six “name:UN:<iso>” tags.

> But there is no perfect solution, and as mentioned, most database
> users will want to pick a localized name of the form "name:<iso>=" so
> these tags should be added.

I’m sorry, but I still have issues understanding why it would be so 
harmless… just to remove the “name” tag (in the case where there is no 
main local language). No information would be lost as all the 
“name:<iso>” (and its variants) would be still there. It would be up to 
the renderrer to have to make a choice. It looks much less ad hoc to me: 
OSM is before all the database, not its renderrers. (Again, amongst 
OSM’s principles, I believe that there is a “semantic first, not 
renderring” one.) I would understand if there would have been some 
well-used renderrers that assume a “name” tag for large objects, but it 
doesn’t seem to be the case from this discussion.

Adding a “name” tag to a place with no local name seems artificial, and 
as you have seen, raises quite a lot of tensions because it implicitly 
imposes the assumption that there should be one main language… and this 
assumption seems so far away from the principles of OSM. As Oleksiy 
Muzalyev said it very nicely: “Translation is becoming the true 
international language”.


By the way, I’ve seen quite unusual changesets related to this issue. 
I’m linking some here, as I think that it illustrates the issues of the 
discussion in a more concrete matter:

There is an edit war here: 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/424311641/history Basically, there 
are some people insisting that the “name” tag of the Maldives be in 
English instead of the local name “ދިވެހިރާއްޖެ”. This is very strange 
to me: in this case there is a clear local language, but some people 
still insist in having it in English. English is locally recognised, but 
it is not the official language. I’m sorry, but it’s difficult not to 
see that as English imperialism: people wanting to impose English 
locally without any reason. I furthermore notice that changeset relative 
to Esperanto are prompt to trigger ban policies, but English-related not 
that much: there seems to be an asymmetry here which doesn’t feel like 
the values of OSM.

Speaking of which, some reverts are done in the name of “Esperanto 
vandalism” while the situation is more complex than this. For instance, 
this revert: https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/77883111 The 
initial changeset didn’t updated “name” tags from English to Esperanto, 
it just removed them, and added localised notes “<tag>:eo”. These 
additional tags has been removed because of the revert. I fully 
understand that one shouldn’t remove the “name” tag until we have set up 
this discussion here, but with such as revert description, it seems as 
if the main issue of the original commit was to add localised tags Oo 
Please don’t use such changeset description unless the original 
changeset really did just update a bunch of “name” tags to Esperanto for 
no apparent reason.


Anyway, as Pierre Béland yesterday evening said it very well: let’s be 
positive, the new year is coming ☺

Cheers,
Martin.