Hi Claudius, list, Thanks for bringing this up as it is by far my favourite OSM issue; there can't be many examples of such widespread bad mapping practices. I've done remote mapping in the Middle East and North Africa which is the background I use to base my opinions on. I'm not aware of the issues in the Far East, but I imagine that there are a number of similarities with examples from the Arabic world.
Thanks also for pointing out the example of open.mapquest.org - that looks like a really good way of handling this. I've previously said that more localised maps would help, but presumably they'd consume much more resources than simply tweaking the osm.org home page. Perhaps a bug reported should be submitted requesting that all names are rendered as the contents of name= whilst followed by name:en= (or int_name=) in brackets when different. Cheers, Joseph On 15 April 2012 16:47, Claudius <claudiu...@gmx.de> wrote: > I'd like to bring this topic on the table once more as I've recently > worked on that in the middle east area. > The challenge is that there are some mappers that add the English name to > place names so that they (and other international visitors) can read the > map at www.openstreetmap.org better. Most of the time this derives from > the misconception that with OpenStreetMap you are editing a map, while in > fact we are editing a database of geographic features and maps are just one > representation of the data. > > The rule about place names the majority of OSM participants have agreed on > is "Use the name that is being used on the ground". Adding English as an > easy to get latinized transliteraion is most of the time not following this > rule. > Usually the best way to convince those users that it's unnecessary work > and actually degrading the data quality is by simply pointing them towards > a different map representation of the same data. MapQuest did a great job > of showing an "English map view" (showing name:en as place name) while > preserving local names (shown in brackets): http://open.mapquest.com/ > > I'd like to use my mail to raise awareness of this topic: > Please talk to you fellow mappers if you see them adding English names in > an act of goodwill to help other visitors of www.openstreetmap.org > > I'd also like to get some feedback especially from east asian countries > (especially looking towards the japanese and korean communities here) if > they want to revise their naming strategy/guideline to only have the local > name in the name-tag and the transliteration in name:en > > Also in Algeria, Libya and some other countries of the Maghreb the double > name tagging has recently gained momentum, probably due to some remote > mappers that cannot read arabic script and wanted to be able to read the > map. Still the primary langauge in all those countries remains Arabic > written in the arabic script. > > I'm also aware that there are several examples where there are multiple > primary languages in the same region: Belgium, Chad, Cameroon, etc. - Of > course for these areas multilangual/multi script naming in the name-tag is > applicable. > > Claudius > > > ______________________________**_________________ > talk mailing list > talk@openstreetmap.org > http://lists.openstreetmap.**org/listinfo/talk<http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk> >
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