Something I've noticed is that the British seem to be particularly bad at entering phone numbers properly, in particular, more than half of them have been entered in national format; even the Americans seem to get this one right and so do other countries.
Other common problems are: - the bogus (0) in an attempt to provide a number that works for Englanders who don't understand international numbers, whilst keeping all the components of the international number; - London area codes being given as 207 and 208, rather than 20. - area codes not being delimited at all. The last three account for about 5% each of the numbers, in London, that were already international. I've already manually fixed these in London. My question is, given that I have good programming skills, and would manipulate a local .osm file, for JOSM, rather than directly using the API, are there likely to be any objections to my changing all London, and later, all UK local format geographic numbers to international, and adding and correcting area codes for London and director areas (I assume there are database copyright issues with a table lookup for the full set of national number group codes, to get the right lengths)? Would it be reasonable to add the above four cases: - local numbers (020 7946 0676); - bogus (0) (+44 (0)20 7946 0676) - no delimiter (+442079460676) - misplaced delimiter (+44 207 946 0676) to the Key:phone wiki entry, or would that bias it too much to the UK case? Incidentally, one common usage I do agree with, and which Ofcom seem to use, is the space after the director exchange, as 79460676 is a bit long to remember as one group, and there is a historical, and some geographic, significance, in this split. Note this phone number has been taken from one of Ofcom's reserved ranges for use in TV, etc., dramas, like the US 555 ones. _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
