On Wednesday 25 March 2020, Frederik Ramm wrote: > > In my opinion, a name:xx tag should only be added if you can > demonstrate that people natively speaking the living language xx are > actually using this name for this entity.
In terms of our traditional values and principles active use of the name is not the necessary criterion, it is verifiable local knowledge. Like with any kind of names practical verification of names would be possible by inquiring about the name to people locally. This essentially means the following practical requirements: * there being a sufficient number of people present locally that speak/write the language in question. Those don't have to be people living there, it can also be visitors. * these people knowing the name in said language - being able to look it up on some external source does not count, that is wikipedia verifiability, not OSM verifiability. * these people largely consistently agreeing on the same name. Example: La tour Eiffel: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/5013364 has a verifiable name:de, name:en, name:ru and probably quite a few other languages as you could go there (normally, not right now of course) and inquire people there about the name in those languages and (a) would find people who can tell it from their own knowledge and (b) these names largely match. > I think we have a very > unhealthy inflation of names in OSM that are added by "single-purpose > mappers" - they come in, stick a name:my-favourite-language tag onto > everything, and go away again. [...] I don't think that is the main problem here. There are certainly people whose main mapping activity is to add name translations from external data sources but that is not really the issue here as far as i can see. It seems to me the problem is more that we have meanwhile a significant fraction of mappers who reject OSMs traditional value of local verifiability and map according to other principles (in particular the usefulness principle - that anything that is useful for certain data users can and should be added to the OSM database). My estimate would be that this applies to at least about 25-30 percent of the active mappers - possibly significantly more especially if you include participants in organized mapping activities. So the problem we are struggling with here is IMO not specific to name tagging but more about a fairly fundamental division within the OSM community about the basic premise of the project. -- Christoph Hormann http://www.imagico.de/ _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
