[OSM-talk] Verifiability of names (was: Persian/Arabian Gulf Tagging)

[Christoph Hormann]

On Friday 10 December 2021, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
>
> we ask the crews of the ships? The people that are there on the
> „ground“? Or someone who lives a hundred kilometers away like someone
> else who uses a different name?
>
> If there is a name that people in far away countries have agreed on
> this means it can and should be recorded.

As i have explained many times:  OpenStreetMap is deliberately limited 
in the scope of information it records to knowledge that it locally and 
independently verifiable.  That is how we manage to cooperate 
successfully on equal levels across language and culture barriers.  If 
everyone wants and tries to record what they perceive to be part of 
their individual or collective perception of the geographic reality 
independent of local verifiability that would not work.  

Just imagine that a few centuries back people from some cultural 
backgrounds would probably have agreed on there being an island in the 
middle of the Atlantic Ocean called Atlantis (or whatever other 
geographic myth your culture has subscribed to).  Human psychology has 
not changed that much since those days, we are still prone to self 
deception, wishful thinking and group-think w.r.t. our perception of 
geography.  What has changed is that we have the technical means now to 
(a) verify our perception with extensive primary data (like imagery) 
from all over the world allowing us to cross check our perception of 
the physical geography.  And more importantly (b) allow us to 
communicate and cooperate with people across distance to distinctly 
record verifiable local knowledge from all over the world instead of 
the classical recording biased perceptions from far away like 
colonialist Europeans have done for centuries.

> That’s how names work, 
> people use the same name so they know what they are talking about.

So you think as long as a large enough number of people agree on a 
common perception of reality that reality becomes true?  World history 
is full of epic fails as a result of that belief.

What is true is that names are part of the cultural sphere, they are how 
people refer to geographic features.  But that does not mean names in 
OSM stand above the paradigm of verifiability, we can record and 
maintain names only when they are verifiably used to refer to the 
actual feature in question locally.  Names that are used exclusively 
by "people in far away countries" to refer to the virtual image of the 
geographic reality they have collectively assembled in their culture 
(like the mentioned example of Atlantis - but also plenty of much more 
mundane examples of distorted and biased images of geography that swirl 
around, you could say the tourism industry has essentially built a 
business model on nuturing such distorted perceptions) do not belong in 
OpenStreetMap.  Leave those to projects like wikidata/wikipedia with 
their 'reliable sources' paradigm.

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