How best to tag Antarctica?

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1

I’ve just noticed that (an) Antarctica node used to have a place tag until 2018 and now no longer does. It was removed by a HOT mapper in the 2nd edit of 5 7 years ago. I think it’s fair to assume that that change might have been somewhat accidental.

Confusingly, there is another Antarctica node which has a place=continent tag which is part of a relation which has some odd not:place=continent and note:not:place tags.

Does anyone know how we’ve ended up in this situation and whether the “node without the place tag” adds any value?

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while I do not know how we got there, from what it looks like, someone has added the continent node https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/36966060/history/1 17 years ago, and someone else has added antarctica as a country 15 years ago https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/506532878/history/1
From what it looks like, the latter one could simply be removed as it is more recent and claimed it was a country which it isn’t?

What is the source for the “name” tag, given there is no population according to OSM (the people on the research stations do not count?)? I guess it could be seen as a multiple language area and have several values in “name” (or no “name” at all).

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Would merging not be better from newest to oldest node to preserve any differential tagging?

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I think having no name tag and only having name:*= would be best. Everywhere else in OSM it’s the local language which decides the language of the name=* tag, given there’s no local population why should English get that privilege? It shouldn’t.

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I agree with this, and therefore other continents should have name=* removed, or at least have some neutral solution that doesn’t go through just using a monolingual English name (shouldn’t South America, if anything, be name=Sudamérica in Spanish?)

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(shouldn’t South America, if anything, be name=Sudamérica in Spanish?)

according to Wikipedia, Spanish and Portuguese are almost on par: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Languages_of_South_America

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I did see that. I would be completely for retagging the continent to name=América del Sur;América do Sul

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for multiple language areas, “ - “ and “ / “ are also customary as separators

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Honestly it’s not that deep. Africa is Africa. Europe is Europe. No need to overthink everything.

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It’s just following ground truth, the primary name of features is in the language (or languages) most used by locals. I get it might be more controversial in features without inhabitants or with very few inhabitants (oceans and Antarctica) but I think it’s quite clear when naming the three inhabited New World continents (the Old World might be trickier)

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To be honest, I wasn’t asking about name (or name:xx) tags here, but about place. I’ll retire quietly and let someone else worry about it :smile: .