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

[Christoph Hormann]

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

A name a mapper records based on what they read in a book is not 
necessarily wrong or non-verifiable.  But the key is to realize that if 
it is the correct name of a certain feature it is so not because it is 
written in a book but in a way *despite* being written in a book.

What determines if a name is the correct name of a feature in OSM is if 
it is the identifier used locally by people to refer to the feature in 
question in communication.  If such a name exists it tends to be 
verifiable through local observation.

If you see the book as a source of verifiability then you are in 
Wikipedia territory, not in OSM.

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

This is what we avoid by limiting ourselves to recording only 
independently verifiable information.  

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