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/
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Atlantika oceano
That’s esperanto. 
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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.
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Maybe it’s more useful to have a different value for noname to indicate there is no name, but name:*?
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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”.
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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
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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:*.
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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?
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Another answer would be to use the predominant bordering languages, which for the Atlantic Ocean would be English, French, Spanish and Portuguese.
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In a recent change set discussion I had a friendly argument about which language to use and I checked out Wikipedia to see which languages are most spoken in this world.
According to the English Wikipedia it is, by a large margin, English (first + second language).
Using this reasoning I vote for the English name of these large waterbodies.
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According to the English Wikipedia it is, by a large margin, English (first + second language).
Using this reasoning I vote for the English name of these large waterbodies.
I don’t think second languages should be relevant for this question, rather have a look at native language speakers, English is only on the third rank, if you trust Wikipedia and its sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_number_of_native_speakers
first is Chinese and second Spanish.
What is your reasoning for this?
The large number of people learning English as a second language is what makes it useful as an international language. On the other hand, a language having a large number of native speakers just means the region it comes from has a high population, not that it is useful around the world.
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Even if English wasn’t spoken by anyone as a native language, yet still the most spoken language (exclusively as a second language then of course) it would be useful for this purpose.
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What is your reasoning for this?
I have to adjust it, when I wrote this the situation I had in mind were smaller objects, locally similar questions arise frequently, but for truly international objects like oceans second languages are indeed relevant.
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We probably would need to extend this to features that are slightly less international than oceans too. Almost everything about the sea represented by node 303,209,363 is incredibly contentious. But at least labeling the sea in English is unsurprising, considering it’s also one of the International Hydrographic Organization’s official languages.
The alternatives would be far more controversial, potentially creating problems for both contributors and data consumers in the countries that would lose out:
- Official language of the country that claims the most of the sea – this is the stuff wars are made of.
- Official language of the most populous country on the sea – Simplified Chinese hands down; by analogy, the Mediterranean would be in Arabic and the Black and Baltic seas would be in Russian.
- Official language of the country with the longest length of coastline – depends how you measure it.
- Language most widely spoken among inhabitants of the Paracels and Spratlys – depends who you count as an inhabitant.
And nerd-sniping users as on the Baltic Sea would prove just as contentious, as we debate which country’s language goes first (repeat the list above).
The only issue with English is that the parties to this dispute naturally also disagree on what the English name should be. But this is a minor dispute by comparison. At least picking the name that the IHO uses gives us a leg to stand on, making it harder for observers to accuse us of having arbitrarily picked a side.
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The vast majority of the oceans are High Seas and outside control of any nation. Looking at languages of coastal states thus makes little sense.
The official languages of the United Nations are Arabic, Chinese, English, French, Russian and Spanish. That seems like a fair way to fill the name tag. Alternatively, look specifically for official languages of international maritime organisations.
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But at least labeling the sea in English is unsurprising, considering it’s also one of the International Hydrographic Organization’s official languages.
if our mapping activity wasn’t forbidden in China and OpenStreetMap blocked, I would expect this node to have a Chinese “name”