Data item labels not in English

Is this practice of adding non-English labels correct?

food court 2

seafood 2

The convention is to only set the label in English for a data item about a key or tag, since raw tags are always in British English. The description can be translated into each language, and a short translated name for the feature type can go in an alias. (Some data items represent non-tagging concepts such as groups or countries; they can have translated labels.)

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No, absolutely not.

All keys and most of the values must be in “Britisch English”.

Exceptions: name=* and similar key/value combinations.

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It seems that users from Sweden or France are particularly “diligent” in this.

I find on Wiki also this. Can you give an example of “nativekey”?

I have no idea what that’s about. The data item scheme has evolved over the years; it might’ve been an early property or something that has since been removed. Or maybe a reference to the practice that you originally asked about, not sure.

In any case, I see no point in translating raw English tag IDs to raw French tag IDs and so on, since it could mislead mappers to actually use those translations as raw OSM tags. Anyone who wants to improve discoverability and usability in other languages should focus on translating descriptions and optionally providing translated aliases.

Wikibase recently introduced a universal fallback locale mul, sort of like how name=* behaves in OSM. Once we upgrade to that version of Wikibase, we may have the opportunity to migrate the tag ID from en to mul, to reduce the awkwardness of only specifying a label in English. But that may still necessitate changes to how iD and other software packages are consuming data items.

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