Hi, we're seeing more and more "name:xx" tags on OSM objects.
Not only are speakers of widely used languages adding their language tags all over the world; but rising interest in OSM also brings us to the attention of language lovers and speakers of minority languages. The less established a language is, the more committed its few proponents to have "their" language respected and recorded. The place node for London has 154 name tags as we speak, but there are several thousand languages in use on the planet, so there's still room for enhancement. Not only well-known tourist magnets carry foreign names; some dedicated language mappers have gone over and beyond the call of duty and added, for example, name:ru tags even to small villages: http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/name%3Aru#map (This is a matter currently under investigation by Data Working Group and it is relatively certain that not all 582,653 name:ru tags will remain.) It is difficult to judge when such foreign names have a right to be there, and when they're just inventions or name translations or transliterations. I guess we'll have to make rules on that somehow, but at the same time I dread doing it, and I wonder: If a place has a wikidata tag, could/should we then simply defer to Wikidata for names in other languages? We are a database of geodata and not one of international cultural heritage; even if London has a name in over 2000 languages, is OSM really the place to record these 2000 names? Would it not be better to record the wikidata link for London, and then (perhaps in co-operation with people at Wikidata) provide means for people doing map rendering to join OSM data with a separately-loaded translation table from Wikidata? We could then limit ourselves to using a "name" tag for the locally used name, or continue to allow a "name:xx" but only if these languages were actually used by the local population; throw in an int_name if you want (but some may say that's already an unfair privilege for users of English and the Latin alphabet). Anything else - i.e. names used for a place in other languages than the local ones - would be off-topic for OSM and should be recorded in Wikidata. Do you think Wikidata could play that role, and take the burden off of us? Or is Wikidata not mature enough for that yet, or even unsuitable? Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
