sorry for writing in English but I cannot speak Polish.
In German forum, user Ulamm claims that all towns and stations in Poland and Czech Republic should not have name:de tags because they are not in Germany any more (most of the towns has belonged to Germany until 1945). He hasdeletedname:de tags from a couple of towns in Poland and Czech Republic over the last days. He also deleted both name:de and name:en tags from railway stations. (I don’t know why he left name:ru)
Background information: The map at www.openstreetmap.de renders always name:de=* if available and name=* only as a fallback.
I think that edits of this type are ruled by Mechanical Edit Policy. This policy requires a discussion BEFORE editing. He did not do that (I have looked for a discussion in international, German, Polish or Czech forum/mailing lists and found nothing)
I ask you as the OSM community in Poland: What is your opinion? Are his edits good or not?
Shall I revert it? I issued an ultimatum to him (8.00 p.m. today).
Best regards from Saxony-Anhalt, Germany
Michael
PS I will post this also to talk-cz mailing list but not to talk-pl.
IMHO If whose ware valid names used in en/de, I would consider it as vandalism, so revert. If whose names are historical, used in some point in past, but not now - should go to old_name:de.
Not so far ago we have a similar ideas from user alfat here: http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=25130
The conclusion from that short discussion were that name:de and old_name:de “belongs” to german users - in polish speaking maps we prefer to use name:pl (or old_name:pl for historical maps) and use name only, if name:pl does not exists (also for maps containing area of Germany ). Of course for polish towns name should be actual polish name, but we do not claim anything about name:de (at least we do not claim to remove them just because these are not german towns).
That is, what I’ve done: For Słubice I changed name:de=Dammvorstadt to old_name:de=Dammvorstadt, created name:de=Słubice (as in Frankfurt everybody talks of Słubice and the street to the bridge is officially named Słubicer Straße), and I created old_name:pl=Zulbice (taken from pl.wiki), as many German readers believe, in that region the Germen names were the original ones.
I wrote it in the German forum a few minutes ago, I repeat it here in English.
I will revert Ulamm’s name changes (apart from Słubice) today or tomorrow. He seems to be troll. He issued this topic almost two years ago. He has damaged a lot of other name:* tags with his edits (he removed at a couple of towns all name:* tags and only left name=*.
He posts nonsense about this topic. As a reason for his deletion, he says that search engines should translate the input from users’ languages’ to the local language … (I could continue but I do not want to write to much about him)
Only in three places, all outside Poland, I had deleted useful tags for other languages. In most of my edits I only changed name:de=… to old_name:de, especially, where the name:de=…s were used for street names, intending to create a bar between German visitors and the life of the inhabitants.
It’s not just about names. User ulamm seems to have no idea of the OSM data structure. For example here he added admin_level=Gmina http://www.openstreetmap.org/way/217904563
). Of course for polish towns name should be actual polish name, but we do not claim anything about name:de (at least we do not claim to remove them just because these are not german towns).