In Filling in the name:en tag in Ukraine a Ukrainian mapper asked a number of questions about name:en, and while answering these I noted that some of the Dutch names in name:nl for places like Kyiv and Maidan square seem outdated, at least in Dutch (the latter also in English, but I’ll leave that to someone else).
Is there a way to address this? The wiki currently still urges mappers not to map in Ukraine.
For Kyiv; in the Netherlands we saw a gradual shift away from ‘Kiev’ based on the Russian pronunciation, to ‘Kyiv’, based on Ukrainian. This shift was accelerated greatly by the war of course. By now all major national Dutch newspapers have switched to Kyiv, but name:nl still uses the outdated ‘Kiev’. Personally, as a native Dutch speaker, I would recommend moving to name:nl=Kyiv and old_name:nl=Kiev.
The same goes for name:fy, which is the Frisian name. Frisia (or Fryslân) is a Dutch province with its own language (as well as Dutch). I’m a Frisian myself; In Frisian media the same shift as in Dutch has happened (example), so here too I recommend name:fy=Kyiv and old_name:fy=Kiev.
For майдан Незалежності it seems that a lot of foreign names (exonyms) are literal translations of the words. So in English it is tagged name:en=Independence Square. People seem to call it Maidan or Maidan Square in English more often though. (I realize ‘Maidan Square’ means ‘square square’ literally, but that’s just how languages borrow words…).
The Dutch newspapers often write ‘Maidanplein’. I haven’t seen ‘Onafhankelijkheidsplein’ (current name:nl) used for the name in Dutch since 2014. Mostly people write ‘Maidan’ (or sometimes ‘Maidanplein’).
For example, from one of the Dutch national newspapers in 2022:
Een kleine optocht met foto’s en vlaggen trekt op zaterdag door het besneeuwde centrum van Kiev: via de Maidan naar het Europa-plein en de naastgelegen Hroesjevski-straat.
Edit: Note that in this example this newspaper still used ‘Kiev’; they switched to ‘Kyiv’ in 2023 as one of the last newspapers in the Netherlands to do so.
Google Translate turns this into this:
Невеликий парад із фотографіями та прапорами пройде в суботу засніженим центром Києва: через Майдан до Європейської площі та прилеглої вулиці Грушевського.
If these are details rather left as-is for now that’s OK too of course, but I figured I could at least mention these here.