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

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

Am Fr., 10. Dez. 2021 um 13:59 Uhr schrieb Christoph Hormann <osm at imagico.de
>:

> On Friday 10 December 2021, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
> > 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.
>


it's what is actually happening. name:language tags are mostly not by
people that live somewhere, but (imports from WP and WD aside) by people
that go to some place. The names that they add are those that they read in
tour guides and books, see on maps and other sources.


> 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.
>


when it comes to names, sure. A name is what people call some specific
thing.
I did not intend to expand the scope to "reality" in general.


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.


exactly.



>   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.
>


if there are no mapping locals of a certain language, the only people that
can and do add names in this language are those from "far away countries".
I see it happening all the time.

How can we decide whether an image of geography is distorted and biased,
what do we do if locals do not agree?

Cheers,
Martin
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