Just a small heads up: I’ve removed the name:de=Biel and name:fr=Bienne tags from the municipality of Biel/Bienne as they are clearly incorrect and added the place node for Bienne as admin_centre (with other words the edit doesn’t change anything for searching and simply provides the correct name for the municipality if somebody was rendering municipality names).
Looking at the place node it does have a very suspect name:en=Biel/Bienne which I would argue is not the English exonym for Biel, but I’ve left that unchanged.
Now you’ve opened the can of worms called “what is a name in OSM”.
I’d agree that official_name:de=Biel/Bienne. However, name:de should have the name that is actually used by German speakers and I suspect that this is rather ‘Biel’.
The more practical problem with your change is that the current tagging just invites people to readd name translations. Same problem as with deleting the name tag in multi-lingual areas.
Also, the relation and the place node represent the same object, so the role should be label not admin_centre.
I haven’t actually opened that can of worms, but maybe the one of what is a place
IMHO this is no different than the common municipality name != name of place where the admin centre is, case, that’s why the admin_centre object role to be consistent. Clearly the German name of the -place- Bienne is Biel nobody is arguing about that.
The “avoid busy mapping” solution is to add name:de=Biel/Bienne and name:fr=Biel/Bienne to the municipality object, the question is if that conflicts with the names on the admin_centre.
PS: Gedankenexperiment: the municipality Biel/Bienne merges with the municipality Grenchen and the merged entity is now called Biel/Bienne/Grenchen, does the place Biel suddenly cease to exist?
Because a place node already exists for the city of Biel/Bienne, the place tag on the municipality (boundary=administrative relation) seems superfluous to me. (Since the city is a municipality, a single area boundary=administrative + place=town would be more accurate. However, this does not seem to be the OSM way of doing it.)
The official name of the municipality/town Biel/Bienne is multilingual. Thus name:de=Biel/Bienne and name:fr=Biel/Bienne would certainly be wrong, but official_name:de=Biel/Bienne and official_name:de=Biel/Bienne also seem questionable. official_name=Biel/Bienne + name:de=Biel + name:fr=Bienne seems the most correct to me.
According to the Federal Statistical Office, 55,932 people lived in Biel/Bienne on 31.12.2023. Thus, as per WikiProject Switzerland, place=town is correct.
As you point out the “official” list of municipalities only knows of Biel/Bienne and that was the only thing I was narrowly referring too, my take on it is that the municipality only has one name which is the same in German and French. When referring to the city in a more hand wavy fashion on all different combinations seem to be in use. in particular in German “Stadt Biel” seems to be common, and in French just Bienne.
