I see a eiheagre | OpenStreetMap has been on an editing spree to the effect:
“Chuir mé ainmneacha Gaelacha na gcathracha i dTuaisceart Éireann leis. Chuir mé an t-ainm Gaelach do Thuaisceart Éireann roimh an ainm Béarla freisin, chun na tíortha eile a mheaitseáil le teangacha Ceilteacha sa Ríocht Aontaithe.”
I practical terms this means they’ve put bilingual variants of various placenames into their ‘name’ tag, separated by a slash.
Is this in line with policy? I would have thought it was best to have ‘name:ga’ and name:en’ tags, and let the user’s browser preferences do the rest?
On the ground, bilingual signage is sporadic in Northern Ireland, generally according to local community preference. Bunging Irish placenames onto somewhere like Lisburn seems a tad mischievous
I don’t know if there is a worldwide consensus on this but from a rendering and display point of view using name:ga=* and name:en=* is much better.
If there is signage on the ground, then whatever is on the sign should be in the name=*. With, of course, the name:ga and name:en tags properly set as well.
@ramthelinefeed I find your comments passive aggressive and politically motivated despite the emojis.
Certainly this contributor could do with some guidance but snarky ignorant comments are not the best way to encourage contributors imho
Irish speakers have every right to have map services rendered in Irish. There is nothing mischievous about that.
The origins of place names is a rich heritage that you have no right to deny. I hope I don’t need to explain the origins of the place names you are referencing.
I am not a moderator by choice, I will ask to have that removed as I am obviously not welcome.
Mister, I have made nearly 13,000 OSM edits over 13 years (unlucky for some…) and if you can find a single one of them which is ‘politically motivated’, I will be very surprised.
I am astounded that you could characterise my multilingual tagging query as an attempt to ‘deny the right of Irish speakers to have map services rendered in Irish’. For goodnesssake catch a hold of yourself.
Neither did I make any ‘snarky ignorant comments’ to the editor in question - I simply left a polite message on one of their edits, giving them a link to the OSM wiki documention about how to use multilingual ‘name’ tags.
In any case, the community reverted their edits days ago, as the consensus clearly is that what they were doing was not the best way to tag these things.
The editor in question seemed to have created their account solely to make those edits. Whether they were a mischief maker or merely a language enthusiast I do not know.
You stated up there ^ that it would be mischevious to add Irish language tags to certain towns.
“Bunging Irish placenames onto somewhere like Lisburn seems a tad mischievous”
You repeated it in your comments to the mapper about Lisburn and Bangor.
Saying it is mischevious to add ‘name:ga’ tags to certain places is very negative and not the OSM community that I thought I was part of.
If you thought that was what I meant, you were seriously confused.
All that contributor’s edits were to places that already had ‘name:en=’ and ‘name:ga=’ tags. (I mean, is there a place of any significance on the entire island of Ireland that doesn’t already have a ‘name:ga=’ tag?? I doubt it!). And no point did I ever suggest those places should not have ‘name:ga=’ tags - that would be absurd.
What the contributor had done was edit the main ‘name=’ tag for the places in question.
They had changed them all to the format ‘name=Irish name / English name’.
OSM policy is fairly straightforward on the matter: you don’t use slash-separated values for the main ‘name=’ tag of places unless they are ‘officially’ designated that way and/or commonly displayed that way on local signage on the ground.
If you ever have the delight of visiting, for instance, the metropolis of Lisburn you would see its name is nearly always signed just in English.
So putting a slash-separated bilingual form in its main ‘name=’ hardly what the OSM tagging rules would recommend.
And even you did want to go for a slash-separated kludge (rather cumbersome from a data-parsing point of view), you would generally put the more common linguistic form first. There’s ample census data out there on the linguistic skills of the residents of Lisburn. A quick rummage on wikipedia found me figures of about 97% have English as their first language, with around 3% having things like Polish, Lithuanian or Portuguese as their first language. And about 3% had some knowledge of Irish as a secondary language.
That does not therefore suggest to me like it would make sense to have “name= Lios na gCearrbhach /Lisburn” as the main tag. Indeed it would probably piss a lot of the inhabitants off, bless them.
The thread kind of petered out, but only because we expended a lot of energy debating database value separator typography with the global community. The occasion for that thread was a mapper who habitually carries out large-scale edits unilaterally across the western hemisphere. Some of their naming edits were subsequently reverted, but otherwise we’re playing chicken about who’s going to clean up the names…
@ramthelinefeed There could be two ways of looking at it. Either I am ‘seriously confused’ or you need to improve your communication.
I will repeat that your words were “Bunging Irish placenames onto somewhere like Lisburn seems a tad mischievous”. Personally I can’t interpret that any other way than negatively and I interpreted it as you saying that ‘name:ga’ should not be included for certain towns including Bangor and Lisburn.
You come across as pompous and entitled. If that is your intention then good job - you certainly stopped me from contributing to the map. If you want to welcome mappers to the community then work on your communication.
you would see its name is nearly always signed just in English.