[OSM-talk] Persian/Arabian Gulf Tagging

[Christoph Hormann]

On Saturday 27 November 2021, Ebrahim Nejati via talk wrote:
> [...]
>
> Please do tell if you have any rejections or have a better solution
> to this issue. But please read the previous made discussions prior to
> that.

I want to try explaining why probably there is relatively little 
reaction to this topic meanwhile from the worldwide OSM community.

In general matters like this in OSM should be resolved through consensus 
of the local mappers in the region.  And most people from elsewhere in 
the world - while many will have an opinion on the matter - do not want 
to push this opinion because they think it is none of their business to 
do so.

It seems fairly evident that consensus among local mappers is hard to 
achieve here and attempts to suggest possible solutions (including the 
option to remove the name tag) seem to have been non-successful.  I am 
not aware if the DWG has already made any kind of decision on the 
matter - but usually they will focus on stopping acute editing 
conflicts and not making long term decisions (which would be both 
non-sustainable at scale and in conflict of the primacy of local 
communities which we have as a basic principle in OSM).

My main takeaway from this matter so far is a reminder how delicate it 
is to provide influencial mapping incentives on features like this.  In 
other words - this conflict is to a quite significant extent the result 
of:

https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/pull/3144

My conclusion meanwhile is that the only responsible use of such data 
from OSM in applications with a mapper feedback function is with the 
application of some name change dampening (in the simplest version that 
would be: only using a name tag if it has been stable for the last 1-2 
months).  If such a rule was applied universally by all OSM data user 
it would be functionally the same as if - as it has been suggested 
here - the name tag was removed in case local mappers cannot reach 
consensus on a name.  I have no illusions on the likeliness of such a 
measure being implemented and it would not completely prevent name 
conflicts like this - it would just make it more likely to resolve them 
(because everyone would have an incentive to do so) and provide a 
neutral fallback in case of a sustained lack of consensus.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
https://www.imagico.de/