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.
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:
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.
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.
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”
Can you explain your reasoning? English is the closest thing to a neutral language in this hotly contested region, Chinese not so much.
This seems like a really good reason to me. The International Maritime Organisation (of which there are 175 member states) made seaspeak the “official language of the seas” and seaspeak is based on English lexicon. The International Hydrographic Organization also seems to default to English.
That, combined with English being the modern global lingua franca, seems to make sense to default to English for oceans and seas. Of course, localisation makes complete sense using the name:XX tagging and it is up to renders to support this.
English is the closest thing to a neutral language in this hotly contested region, Chinese not so much.
Tell this the Chinese that English is the most neutral possibilty 
I’ve always resisted this argument because I don’t think that this project should special-case English names just because it started in England, or a lot of contributors are from English-speaking countries - I’m usually that person banging on about how changeset comments should try and be in a language that the editor will understand, etc. 
However here it’s difficult to resist English as a fallback, for the reasons outline above.
Moved misplaced post
Just a 2 cent question… what’s the destination of rivers tagged as when discharging into the Atlantique or any ocean for that matter?
Some agreement
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/destination=Atlantic%20Ocean#overview
180 x Atlantic Ocean
A compromise is not necessarily loved by anyone. Would people in Indonesia, the Philippines, or Vietnam agree that Chinese is the most neutral possibility? What about other countries that don’t claim the sea as their own but rather insist that it’s international waters subject to freedom of navigation?
Are you proposing now we should split the ocean into international part and several national parts? For me it would be very strange to see whole Arabia labeled in Arabic, but the waters around are in English. Same for China, Japan, Russia, Spain…
If it should be English, due to lingua franca, then it definitely needs to be int_name. name should contain English for that reason.
Only when a neighboring country applies a special designation to its corner of the ocean or sea. For example, the Mar de Grau corresponds to Peru’s claim rather than the entire Pacific Ocean:
It probably would make sense to map the West Philippine Sea as a separate place=sea node from the existing South China Sea node, because the Philippines only claims the West Philippine Sea to extend as far as its EEZ; it doesn’t apply this name to the entire sea.
This is somewhat antithetical to the modern concept of international waters, harkening back to the older idea of spheres of influence. There’s a long history of maps that reflect spheres of influence through aspects other than label language, but this history is strongly tied to colonialism. Still, I can see how having an international body of water inherit a language from neighboring countries would look less jarring when superficially glancing at a map without deeply considering the choices it makes.
OSM’s concept of supporting a massively multilingual map, by largely putting the on-the-ground language in name=*, is unusual, almost without precedent in the history of cartography. Most maps aim to be useful to an individual reader, but there are very few panglots (people who speak every language).
Rather, our reason for putting so many languages into name=* is that we need to be able to justify the choice of language on first principles, regardless of the user’s nationality or language skills. There are inherent limitations to this approach, problems that have no perfect solution. One of these imperfect solutions is to lean on international law.
Fortunately, anyone who finds the English seas jarring can simply switch the entire map to their language, as long as they’re using a dynamically localized map, such as one powered by vector tiles:
Even a map that combines the user’s preferred language with the local language, such as OSM Americana, probably would not do so for most large-scale natural features that belong to Mother Nature more than any country in particular.
Plenty of world atlases primarily label places, rivers, and mountain ranges in the local languages (with parenthetical glosses in the reader’s language). When we designed localized labels in OSM Americana, we took inspiration from some of these atlases. However, relatively few label seas and oceans in the languages of neighboring countries.
A rare counterexample is the Pergamon World Atlas, published in 1968. In this atlas, each continent-scale plate labels the Atlantic Ocean in English, the overall publication’s main language. (The atlas is based on a Polish atlas that presumably fell back on Polish.)
However, each plate of a surrounding country or region labels the same ocean in a romanization of the local language: French off the coast of France, Portuguese off of Iberia, Arabic off of North Africa, Afrikaans off of South Africa. English is glossed in parentheses:
The South China Sea was no less contentious in the 1960s than it is today. This atlas splits the difference, labeling it “Nan Hai” (Chinese) off the coast of China, “Laut Tiongkok Selatan” (Indonesian) off of Indonesia, “Biển Đông” (Vietnamese) off of South Vietnam, and “South China Sea” (English) off of the Philippines – sometimes simultaneously:
This approach to labeling, based on the plate’s main focus, would be difficult to translate to an interactive digital map. Even then, it would have to be based on manual hints specific to a style and zoom level, but definitely not raw OSM geodata.
…and an old Chinese map labels everything in Chinese… File:Zhenghemap.jpg - Wikimedia Commons
I think this approach doesn’t help and the question goes back to how to map names where names in multiple languages have an equal importance.
In my humble opinion, we need to get to the point where the name of a transnational natural feature is so unimportant, so seldom used by data consumers compared to the localized names, that filling it in with the international name (based on international law) wouldn’t cause a fuss over the choice of language. Frankly, stuffing these seas’ and oceans’ name tags with a mountain of names does very little for actual language diversity.
Frankly, stuffing these seas’ and oceans’
nametags with a mountain of names does very little for actual language diversity.
having a value like “Arctic Ocean” in “name” is a clear sign of western dominance in OpenStreetMap https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/305639710
rather than being “neutral”. This is not about language diversity but about the “default” being neutral or partial. E.g. in this example, the name could also have a Russian name additionally in “name”
English is long past the point of being an exclusive ‘Western’ language though, however you interpret it. Seaspeak mentioned above is a good example, but it is an official language in, for example, India and Nigeria, and taught as a mandatory subject in most of the world.
Using English as the ultimate fallback for things with a name that fall outside of a limited number of language regions is totally reasonable, and anyone who really dislikes that already can use name:*. Anyone who simply does stuff with OSM data and doesn’t feel the need to parse a stack of name-tags can just depend on name having a sensible default.
I think we need to be careful not to throw out the baby with the bathwater. A little bit of “Western” bias can be tolerated - after all, OSM has been invented in the UK and nobody is forced to participate. We also have a long-standing agreement to use British English in common keys and values (bias!!!) and the DWG has occasionally enforced the rule that when you edit in an area, you should write changeset comments either in the local language or in English (bias!!!). We need to remain practical. I am fine with cross-language-border things carrying English name tags for reasons of pragmatism.
I agree with the gist of your comment, but would note that often just defaulting to whatever the endonym is (i.e., name=*), is highly desirable. When I visit a country where I can read and pronounce the local names, having my map present them to me in name:nl=* because I happen to be Dutch is absolutely not wanted.
I may not speak a lot of Italian, but when I travel there it is not helpful to see a name on the map which nobody there knows or uses (say ‘Turijn’ when I’m going to Torino). This goes doubly so for countries where I am fluent in the local language, like Germany.
Just an example of where name=* has value. (Of course, not related to the ocean names.)
Using English as the ultimate fallback for things with a name that fall outside of a limited number of language regions is totally reasonable, and anyone who really dislikes that already can use
name:*.
I think it would be reasonable to keep “name” empty if it falls outside of a limited number of languages (at most 2 or 3), and everyone who thinks falling back to name:en is totally reasonable when name is missing, can do it. This way we would know (from a data perspective) that the English name is in “name“ because it is the local language and not just a fallback. It wouldn’t change anything for people looking at the map (if their creators believe that English is the best fallback for missing “name”s)
