I'm putting also the mappers reply on the list, because he asked me so in a second mail because he has not much time at the moment: #########
Hi sure I can understand english and thank you for this email I contribute to osm in that i get the geonames databases for arabic countries and translate the place names to arabic , this is a very long and heavy work I am doing alone. Then I import those translations to OSM . I am still working on some other arabic speaking countries to be imported in a few monthes. in the original databases there are already names in different languages (mostly english , but many others too) and the idea was to use every bit of information and not to loose vauable infos already available. for example : you say in the mailing list: "I recently noticed that there are very long values in int_name for some cities in Near East, e.g. the City of Sidon: http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/564348842 with the int_name value: Saida,Sayda,Saïda,Sidon,Sidon"",Sidonas,Sidone,Sidón,Sydon,Sídon,Şaydā,Σιδώνα,Сидон,Сидонъ,צידון,صيدا,صَيْدَا,サイダ, Sidon" as you can see , there are many different ways to name a single city from arabic to latin french people would say sidon italian sidone english : saida or saïda etc.... you can also see in this tag that here are japaneneese , hebrew, greek, urdu , russian , etc... names and spellings the idea was to keep this very valuable info for other OSMers to copy this tag to their respective lang to speed up internationalization. once they copy say the greek name from the tag name_int to name:gr they could also delete the tag from the name_int tag and so on....keeping russian and others to the respective users . the tag name:ar1 is just a duplicate of the tag name:ar and name for security (kind of spare part) because many unaware and beginner osmers remove the tag name:ar or name and put english or whatever else. in that case I can restore the tag to arabic with a few scripting or emacs commands. I would suggest to keep it in the OSM DB. Ok so ? cheers metehyi
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