Sorry for English, but my Russian is too basic to communicate (especially write). I would like to change “name” tag of your country relation to just “Россия” (or maybe “Росси́я”?) instead of current “Российская Федерация”:
Some local communities use different languages than what I would expect - for example India community is using English a lot for “name” tag and I don’t know why not Hindi+Devanagari for example. But the choice of language is just another thing than using common vs official form. Finland/Suomi/Russia/Россия are all common forms, so it’s up to the community to pick one (or more, like in “België - Belgique - Belgien”) and they all belong to “name”, while Republic of Finland/Suomen tasavalta/Russian Federation/Российская Федерация are all official forms and belong to “official_name”.
In your case the language and script are the same as I would expect (Russian+Cyrillic), so I guess “Россия” is the only common form that counts and Russia/Rosja/රුසියාව etc. are not suitable.
I don’t have any objections, but ideally we also want consistency across other name tags too. So I think we should use “Россия” for name (+name:ru) and translations without “federation” part for name:* tags and “Российская Федерация” for alt_name and respective translations for alt_names:* tags.
I gave my reasons at the beginning. We have plenty of space for official name of Russia, so rendering space is definitely not a problem, but it’s just not a common name and almost all the other countries use common names, so for me it’s about following tag definition and consistency at the planet level.
Name (common/official/…) is very general feature, it applies to all the objects, not only countries and regions. It makes sense to start with such big entities, because there isn’t too many of them, but it should no stop here.
It’s an official name and we have tag for it, alt_name is the last resort category: “If there is a name that does not fit in any of the above keys, alt_name can be used”.
В своё время меня коробило что сократили названия республик. Теперь это Чечня, Дагестан, Татарстан. Логика была примерно такая же как и для “Россия”. Так что это не более чем продолжение тренда по переименовыванию республик.
P.S. При этом у нас есть “Республика Алтай” и “Республика Бурятия”. Даже на уровне регионов нет единообразия
No objections, since official_name will stay with federation part. Also we should not forget about name:ru and alt_name. And anyway, we should also go through all other countries to ensure this change is consistent.
Official is useful for official things, but is of course not neglected - media use official names a lot. But when you say or write someone about your country it’s rather “Russia”, isn’t it? The same as with people names - official is your name+surname and it’s perfectly valid and useful, but that’s not how one usually talk about people. Sometimes common name is the same as official name, but this is not the case.
It actually has historical roots “Россия” was considered as not politically correct word during USSR time and using it was considered as a kind of Russian nationalism. So officials used “РСФСР” instead of Russia (you know there were no such problems with Ukraine, Estonia, Armenia etc). When USSR gone “Россия” become more appropriate but to support political correctness (Tatarstan, Yakutia etc) media changed to “Российская Федерация”. It is to support idea: “people who live in Russia not Russians but Citizens of Russia/Россиянин”.
For many years it become accepted for all to use equally “Россия/Российская Федерация” but on official maps it is usually “Россиийская Федерация” so people a bit worried when see on map short name.
On osm-carto we use common names for all the objects (and http://openstreetmap.ru also shows this version). However it’s perfectly possible to have some other maps with official names, be it just for the countries or anything else too, but it’s just a design choice for every map.
Thanks for the historical background. There are some exceptions with country names - like Congo (there are 2 different countries, so official names are used) or USA (probably since common name “America” is also the name of the 2 continents), so it’s up to you as a local community to decide which form should be used as a “name”.
“Россия” was considered as not politically correct word during USSR time and using it was considered as a kind of Russian nationalism. So officials used “РСФСР” instead of Russia (you know there were no such problems with Ukraine, Estonia, Armenia etc). When USSR gone “Россия” become more appropriate but to support political correctness (Tatarstan, Yakutia etc) media changed to “Российская Федерация”. It is to support idea: “people who live in Russia not Russians but Citizens of Russia/Россиянин”.