On Thu Aug 2 20:22:16 BST 2012 Frederik Ramm wrote: > Yes, because as soon as you "invent" this status part, you will offend > someone, no matter whether you choose the Ukrainian or the Russian > version of the status part. This is the main misunderstanding here. We tried to explain it several times, but were always ignored by the guys who started to change everything "back to Russian" and unfortunately by DWG.
Our initial changes of streets in Crimea to Ukrainian was driven by a simple technical decision, which is to have 'name' in Ukrainian, so the map will work as is in navigation software, name:en tags could be generated, and validators could be written. No politics, no 'pro-Ukrainian' or 'anti-Russian', although we are constantly being painted as such. Suddenly a newcomer approaches, and silently mass-renames many streets into Russian, loosing original Ukrainian renderings along the way, e.g. without copying them to name:uk. As we always do in such cases, he was contacted in private, and in parallel his actions were discussed in "users: Ukraine" forum. In three days he gave his 'go ahead' to revert his changes. I was the one who made the reverts. We thought it's over. Then couple weeks ago we occasionally found out that he silently reverted the reverts, and then after my following revert contacted DWG. After the first case we were openly encouraging him and anyone else from Crimea to step in and propose to change the rule, which they never even tried, only expressed heavy abuses in return. The main reasoning for our offer was that we cannot silently alter the guidelines on the Wiki without prior discussion. Many fellow users, including those closely involved in the discussions, were all OK with having Crimea all in Russian, and still are. We just did not want to create a precedence when a total newcomer (with 10 new objects on the map) can jump in and twist the whole thing as he wants (and the main arguments of the guy was that 'I want it to be in Russian since I speak Russian'). What made the whole thing bitter is that after all we found out that the initial user who started all of this and who wrote to DWG, actually is a permanent resident of Moscow, Russia, and as such is not local only to Crimea, but even to whole Ukraine. Nevertheless, we are willing to ignore this fact and address the problem. So, to make it straight. o We are fine with clear and simple rule to have 'name' tag in Crimea for street ways (to give proper definition, within a polygon defined by relation 72639), such as 'have Russian in name tag', or 'have 2 renderings in name tag'. This will make possible to continue the current pace of using software in processing and exporting territory of Ukraine. o The rule above cannot be applied to city and village names, since all of those are in Ukrainian everywhere. All place nodes already have 4 name tags. o The rule to have name in Ukrainian never stretched on usual objects such as POIs. E.g. we always wrote in 'name' whatever is actually on the advertisement for this amenity. There are names in Ukrainian, Russian and English in the country. So there is no need to enforce anything in this regard. o Our initial decision to have Ukrainian in name tag had nothing to do with politics or oppression of any human being. It is a purely technical decision, in the light that OSM is a Database, and not just a map. o Current DWG decision does not address the problem at all, since historically same object may (and does) have inconsistent naming on the ground. o Moreover, having unpredictable mix in 'name' will degrade quality of any navigational maps or geocoding. o Substantial part of Crimea was mapped in Ukrainian from the beginning, simply because people followed the established rule. We have several locals from Crimea in the forums who were surprised by the dispute, and who did the initial mapping. Nevertheless, it is OK to rename those to whatever be decided. Thus, I would like to request DWG to revisit their decision and whole "dispute", and come up with something which is more transparent and easy to follow. Eugene _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
