Language facilities, how do we map them?

“In theory, it is in Flanders, but the majority of its inhabitants are French-speaking.”

I don’t think it’s a good idea to use qualifications of the population in a tagging scheme.

Using the argument of the numerical linguistic composition of the population is the reintroduction of the idea behind the old linguistic census (talentelling – recensement linguistique).

The use of the local official language as “name=*” seems to me a very rational choice that can be objectivated and described into the conventions of the wiki.

“Dear OSM users! Once again, please leave politics aside, or to other map service providers! Reflect reality! Not wannabe-realities.”

“Our role is not to do politics, but to reflect the reality as is on our maps :wink: Leave politics to politicians, history to historians, and maps to mappers :wink:

Are there enough Dutch speaking people in Enghien, or enough French speaking in Bever to give it a bilingual “name=*”?

I think we should not use such arguments for mapping.

By calling to avoid politics into mapping, the abandoned Belgian political habit of counting and quarreling is reintroduced into mapping.

Leave mapping to the mappers, who, I think, should try to be as rational as possible.

Conventions for mapping are not always easy to install.

And then there is that story of the sleeping dog…

A little know fact is that Nominatim works considerably better when you type not just a street name but also a city name.
Searching on Rue du Maquis, Renaix in Nominatim immediately gets you to the desired target. Without it, Nominatim would start by showing all the other “Rue du Maquis” elsewhere in Belgium or France which have a full match, and the one you wanted is buried in the list, as it is only a substring. I agree that in that case, name:fr and name:nl should be added and would help.

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In the poll, a majority voted in favour of using bilingual name=* tags in facility municipalities. If we can agree on using this as the convention from now on, we could start looking into retagging existing objects (manually or automated).

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