So Amerigo Vespucci sailed across that nameless pond to have his first name taken to label the new continents.
Pulls up old paper print of the Atlas, edition 1968 and checks, yes middle of the pond, no soul in sight is printed Atlantique.
Tiring those 3 headed specimens known in Scandinavian lore as trolls.
I’d take a stab at English, Spanish, Portugese & French as the 4 leaders?
But what do people think about my suggestion of using a numeric identifier for the name key? That would seem to eliminate opportunities for argument, at the cost of looking really weird to users who don’t specify a language.
That’s even worse than just picking a language. Some rare features like these just fall outside of any clearly dominant language or are international (exceeding two or three countries) in scope. Using English there for name is just sensible.
I’m Dutch, do I care that the default name tag for an ocean is in English? Of course not. If I want a map with as many Dutch labels as possible, I would just use name:nl.
If English is really problematic, then use the Latin Oceanus Atlanticus for a classical feel. It would be one of the least jarring identifiers you can use.
Wiki:
So, it does not mean: The OSM-object does not have a name-tag.
Question for me is: Should the name be set to some kind of “international term” for the Atlantic ocean.
yes please, an international term is what we need. What do you suggest specifically?
The Latin would have the approval of the Holy See.
If English is really problematic, then use the Latin
Oceanus Atlanticusfor a classical feel. It would be one of the least jarring identifiers you can use.
the Romans took from the Greek, Ἀτλαντὶς θάλασσα would be closer to the roots then 
although expressing a slightly different concept, maybe
Personally I would be fine with English in the name tag for the Atlantic Ocean, I think it would be understood by the vast majority of all neighbouring population, even if they don’t generally speak English, and while there is undeniably some imperialistic background, that’s how it is, we just map what is there. For the Pacific Ocean or the Arctic I see more potential for problems
Greek has the problem of being indecipherable for most people unless transliterated. The latin alphabet doesn’t suffer this drawback (not in any meaningful sense).
Would it? Anyone using maps in their native language will benefit from name:*. Besides, name often contains scripts and languages completely unintelligible to most, and that’s fine. Besides, most international collaboration in the Pacific or Arctic is done in English. Denying that just seems overly political without any tangible benefit for the map’s users.
(Although I must admit those Latin names are kind of sexy.)
Besides, most international collaboration in the Pacific or Arctic is done in English.
I don’t have knowledge about the Pacific, but for example the homepage of the arctic council is in Russian and English https://arctic-council.org/ru/
Atlantika oceano
That’s esperanto. 
You’re joking, but this whole schmozzle started because a user didn’t like the plethora of English terms in use for e.g. the Atlantic Ocean and wanted to use Esperanto instead. It’d be lovely if we did all speak the same language, but we don’t - at least not yet.
Maybe it’s more useful to have a different value for noname to indicate there is no name, but name:*?
For better or for worse, English is the international language of today’s world. It is the pragmatic choice for the fallback name tag in a case like this. I say fallback, because data consumers should be encouraged to always use name:lang tags first where they are present. Other suggestions like Latin, Esperanto, or a number would be far less useful to far fewer people worldwide.
That being said, having no name tag on international objects would also be a reasonable policy with some additional tagging. In this case data consumers need a way to easily tell that an object is tagged with multiple names, despite lacking the name tag. This way they can avoid prematurely filtering it out of their data set. We could say that data consumers are expected to look for a variety of different name keys or any key matching a certain pattern, but this seems overly complicated for the initial filtering step. Another option would be a tag that explicitly states “this object has names despite lacking the plain name key” much like noname=yes explicitly states “this object really has no name and it’s not a mistake that the tag is missing”.
I have opened an RFC on a propsal to add noname=multiple_languages in order to provide an alternative tagging scheme for exactly this situation:
https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/rfc-intentionally-omitted-name-tags
and that would be just for the ancient Greek (I won’t even touch the dialect origin, I’m not too familiar with differentiating those 
)
I would be find with the English name aswell, mainly because that’s the currently de-facto international language of communication, no matter if we like it or not.
This is annoying for data consumers, because the convention is that named things reliably have at least name, and optionally a bunch of name:*. When a data consumer sets a preference for a certain language too, name is useful as the ultimate fallback option.
Avoiding English just to avoid English is a bad reason to maim the data. It also feels like something most people don’t even find troublesome. These areas are rare exceptions on OSM where the vast majority of named things lie within areas where the use of name is already well-established and documented.
In any case, anyone with really strong feelings about any other language that might go in name can already use name:*.
It’s avoiding English because a majority of areas bordering the ocean are not English speaking.
Hardly relevant with oceans. Like continents, these are truly global affairs. Anyone who speaks a language with more than 100,000 speakers or so is likely to be covered by name:*. This is about name. For a global feature like an ocean there is hardly anything more appropriate than the lingua franca of the world.
Sure, some people will get upset over the dominance of English, but are they in a majority compared to people who will find not assigning any name just silly?
Another answer would be to use the predominant bordering languages, which for the Atlantic Ocean would be English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.