apart from the issue "international objects receive a tag 'name' with
an English value", there are other ways in which you see how we're
letting USA-UK patronize the rest.
the latest example in my experience would be the 'sac_scale' tagging.
it comes from the SAC-CAS classification, of the Schweizer
Alpen-Club/Club Alpino Svizzero/Club Alpin Suisse/Club Alpin Svizzer,
yet OSM held the discussion in English, and it not only chose
`sac_scale` for the tag name, it also decided not to use the Swiss
codes T1..T6 (language independent), but the English version of the
human readable explanation for the codes: T1
(hiking/escursione/randonnée/Wandern) .. T6 (difficult alpine
hiking/escursione alpina difficile/randonnée alpine
difficile/schwieriges Alpinwandern).
a more important issue (I would call it "mapping outside Europe",
hence the subject) is for me each and every (photo)graphic explanation
of the tagging values. take `highway`
(https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:highway). text are fine,
really, but the associated pictures seem all taken in Europe, or North
America, they have more chances to confuse the mapper based in Africa
or South America, than helping them.
in Panama many roads are classified as 'camino de verano', they look
like highway:track, but are really highway:unclassified with an extra
indication for the months where they are expected to be passable.
maybe can be solved in the wiki by changing the link to the picture
into a link to several pictures, but I'm afraid that we need to
address this in the standard renderer as well: users also expect some
of the information to be reflected in the rendering, explaining why so
many mappers still use highway:track despite one repeating "don't map
for the renderer".
in Morocco (and I guess elsewhere too) we have small towns with
undeveloped areas, crossed by paths with residential function, or
large cities with extremely narrow alleys, again with residential
function. these have been solved by different mappers in different
ways, leading to very inconsistent mapping, in particular where there
isn't a local, assertive, mappers' community. (Morocco and Panama are
two such cases, Colombia is much better in this aspect.)
Wow. That’s quite impressive examples. I fully agree that this
Europe-centrism might lead to issues in the future. I remembered being
quite confused when I first read the documentation for crossing ways, as
they are all following UK’s naming system (which I’ve never heard
before). They are well-documented, so I guess that it’s fine. But I
understand what you mean: the “name” tag issue may not be the most
relevant in this family of issues.
This might indicate that the people discussing in this mailing list are
from a very specific background, possibly caused by the language of the
mailing list itself.
At the same time, I have to admit that I don’t feel like there are that
much pictures on the documentation. I was for instance surprised that
there was no picture for the “minimap” tag in the wiki (I fixed this in
the meantime ☺). So it might be something that we can easily improve
step by step ☺
I’m not sure what to conclude here. I guess that being conscious of the
Europe-centrism issue during discussions might help? Or that we may need
to look for volunteers to complete the OSM wiki with additional pictures
from non-Europe/North America? I will look at the pictures I took back
to been I lived in Chile and Brazil… but as I wasn’t into OSM then, I
won’t have much useful 😔
Regards,
Martin.
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