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

Michael Collinson mike at ayeltd.biz
Wed Jan 8 06:14:49 UTC 2020


On 2020-01-07 18:27, Mateusz Konieczny wrote:
> 6 Jan 2020, 16:35 by dieterdreist at gmail.com:
>
>         On 6. Jan 2020, at 07:29, Maarten Deen <mdeen at xs4all.nl> wrote:
>
>             Baltic Sea to be the "Baltic Sea" or for South America to
>             be "South
>             America" - this is an example of English imperialism.
>
>         This "imperialism" idea of yours is just your idea. It is not
>         something that is widely felt.
>
>     regarding imperialism, I think it’s hard to reject the reasoning
>     that English is in widespread use because of imperialism.
>
> Yes, but using it for a pragmatic reasons
> for an international communication is
> usually not imperialism.
>
> I can try to communicate with group of  people
> from different countries in Polish,
> Latin, Sindarin or Esperanto.
>
> But except rare cases using English is likely
> to result in more efficient communication.

Totally agree with Mateusz. English is the current trading language. It 
has been Farsi and other languages in the past. It will probably 
Mandarin Chinese/simplified hanji in the future. But right now it is 
English.

I think the whole debate misses the point. The OSM database is 
language-agnostic right now. The https://www.openstreetmap.org slippy 
map was intended to A map show-casing the database. But it has turned 
into THE map.

A potential solution is to offer centralised support for other lingual 
(and culture, which is not always the same thing) maps. That of course 
is a much easier thing to say rather than do as it requires time and 
money resource, but it puzzles me why 15 years into the project we only 
have 4 layers on our main site.


Mike


Note that we do have some great projects in the wealthier economies such 
as https://openstreetmap.se/ https://openstreetmap.jp 
https://www.openstreetmap.de/  ... Why aren't these integrated in some 
way into our main site !?

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