I posted a changeset comment in https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/76520412
Dec 6, 2020, 08:00 by m...@nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us:
> Vào lúc 03:01 2020-12-04, Frederik Ramm đã viết:
>
>> Hi,
>>
>> when reverting an edit this morning I noticed that the node for
>> Washington (https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/158368533) has myriad
>> name:xx tags, many of which seem to be some variant of "Washington D.C."
>> (with or without commas or dots), whereas the "local" name seems to be
>> just Washington, without the D.C.
>>
>> As a native speaker of German I can assure you that we don't call the US
>> capital "Washington D.C." as the name:de tag claims; I would assume that
>> it is similar for most other languages. The German-language OSM map at
>> https://www.openstreetmap.de/karte.html?zoom=10=38.70174=-76.93764
>> has a mechanism where it displays the German name and then, if the local
>> name is different, the local name below; since the German name
>> "Washington D.C." and the local name "Washington" are different, this
>> leads to a somewhat funny display (whereas the logic works ok for other
>> US cities).
>>
>> I could of course fix the German name but I think that it might need a
>> more thorough review and I don't feel competent for that.
>>
>> Two name tags (and this is checking only those that use Roman letters)
>> look like they might be entirely wrong and refer to the District of
>> Columbia only:
>>
>> name:lfn=Distrito de Columbia
>> name:mi=Takiwā o Columbia
>>
>
> Most of these localized names were added in changeset 76520412 [1] based on
> labels on the associated Wikidata item. [2] So this time it was not a case of
> promoting a particular minority language. In fact, I don't think much
> attention was paid to the names being added, or perhaps the Tajik name
> would've remained to the effect of "Washington District of Columbia" instead
> of being changed to "Washington (city)".
>
> This same changeset changed the name of the District of Columbia relation to
> "Washington, D.C." in many languages, including English. [3] This results in
> Nominatim returning results like "Washington, D.C., Washington, D.C." I think
> it was inappropriate to rename the district this way. I think it was another
> oversight on the part of the changeset's author, because Wikidata has a
> distinct entity for the district. [4]
>
> [1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/76520412
> [2] https://www.wikidata.org/entity/Q61
> [3] https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/162069
> [4] https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q3551781
>
>> Then again, I've heard people say "I was in D.C." and mean the city, so
>> perhaps that *is* a legitimate name for the city? Maybe someone in the
>> US community wants to have a look and do this right.
>>
>> It is a bit of a conundrum in OSM - we usually say that local knowledge
>> tops everything, but then again for many of the languages there might
>> not even *be* a local Washington mapper in OSM ;)
>>
>
> As others have pointed out, a local would refer to the city as "D.C." even
> while acknowledging that the city's formal written name is "Washington" or
> "Washington, D.C." I think common sense would require us to relegate "D.C."
> to loc_name or short_name, just as a general-purpose, global map would only
> shorten San Francisco to the local shorthand "S.F." and Salt Lake City to
> "SLC" when space is at a premium.
>
> Thanks in part to the D.C.-based Voice of America, I'm sure you could find a
> local to get the translated name of Washington, D.C., for many languages, but
> I'm not confident they would choose the same names as Wikidata.
>
> For example, both VOA and the local Vietnamese media still generally call the
> city "Hoa Thịnh Đốn", a relic of the early 20th century when Vietnamese still
> borrowed Chinese characters for world-class cities. "Hoa Thịnh Đốn" is easy
> for a Vietnamese speaker to pronounce, but it only kind of sounds like
> "Washington" in the way that an eggcorn sounds like its original phrase. It's
> archaic and probably unknown to the younger generation in Vietnam. The
> Vietnamese government prefers the phonetic respelling "Oa-sinh-tơn", which
> conversely is unknown to older Vietnamese Americans.
>
> When I originally tagged the D.C. node with Vietnamese names in changeset
> 5439052, I intended for the fallback to be "Washington", as a compromise
> between the traditional and more modern names. But I hesitated to explicitly
> tag name:vi=Washington because it's incompatible with the Vietnamese
> alphabet. I guess I should've added it as a bulwark against armchair
> linguistics. Changeset 76520412 set name:vi to "Washington, D.C.", which to a
> Vietnamese speaker is rather like labeling New Orleans as "New Orleans, LA"
> on a map.
>
> Long story short, I find changeset 76520412 to be problematic in the
> languages I know, let alone the many languages I don't. Thanks for bringing
> it to our attention.
>
> --
>
