On 26/01/2016 19:16, Mateusz Konieczny wrote:
In my experience name, name:en, old_name, alt_name, alt_name:ru etc
etc etc were always sufficient. An example where multivalue names are
truly necessary would be interesting.
Here's a brief summary of where I think that what we have now for names
isn't "always sufficient":
There are places that have two or more names in different languages.
One is not more important that the other; they're exactly equivalent.
We don't have a way to represent that currently - only to store a list
of names (in one format or another). We only have one "name" tag, and
in some places the local community have decided on the
"Londonderry/Derry" approach because there is no correct answer to which
of two (or more) local languages should go there. Even then there's
still the decision of which one to put first :)
There's also the "Abergavenny problem" (a term I invented the last time
it came up on the lists) - there are places with multiple languages
which are in local use, and also names in other languages not in local
use (often but not always transliterations to a non-Latin alphabet). We
don't currently have a good way of differentiating between those two sets.
We also have the potential problem that if we stored every translated /
transliterated name into every one of ethnologue.com's languages we'd
have an unfeasibly large amount of data per place - it would make any
data manipulation operations with OSM data significantly more
cumbersome. In answer to that last problem someone usually says
"wikidata" but we don't yet have a tried, tested and scaleable way of
combining data from wikidata with data from OSM on the fly.
Some more of the issues associated with multiple languages in a place
were discussed in the Algerian forum:
http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=31333
There were issues raised there that I hadn't previously considered,
including combining a left-to-right and right-to-left name in a
"Londonderry/Derry"-style name, and what happens when the most widely
spoken language and the official language aren't the same.
Cheers,
Andy (SomeoneElse)
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