Hi! Recently i was browsing highest peaks on OSM and noticed Denali had a recent edit putting "Mount McKinely as loc_name=Mount McKinley. I recognized this as wrong and made a changeset comment requesting them to change it to the official name. They did, which is correct, but also put Mount McKinley as the name= which i think should require some thoughts from the community; and even after the whole Gulf of Mexico/America debacle, i have seen Denali mentioned but not in express detail on what should be done. What do you all think? Link to the discussion on changeset comment here: Changeset: 163626536 | OpenStreetMap
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I’d like to propose “Mount McKinley” as the name because its been renamed as per Govt order and that’s how it should be displayed on the map. Google maps has also updated the name. Local name could still be “Denali”.
Please see existing conversation about this over in this thread: Gulf of America - Gulf of Mexico
Apologies, I probably shouldn’t have closed this thread. Let’s continue the conversation about Denali in particular here.
official_name=Mount McKinley is reasonable given the change in GNIS (nat_name seems fine too). Most people call it Denali though (especially in Alaska) so name=Denali reflects that this is the common name. loc_name is generally for names known only by locals that the wider world may not be aware of.
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First of all, thanks for keeping the discussion on the changeset civil despite a hot-button topic. There were plenty enough things for OSM to debate before all this started. 
The mountain did come up in the Gulf thread, but it got buried pretty quickly. Most of the community is international, so they care a lot more about the Gulf.
There are some general practices around name tags that we should maintain regardless of where we land in this particular case:
name=*should match thename:*=*in the predominant local language. That would bename:en=*, unless we really want to list out the name of the mountain in each of Alaska’s 24 official languages, separated by semicolons. (Which we could do…) The purpose ofname=*is for data consumers that don’t or can’t personalize the map to each user’s preferred language on the fly.name=*andname:en=*should be the predominant name for the feature, or at least a very common one if there isn’t a predominant name. Any other fairly common name can go inalt_name=*and other*_name=*where geocoders will find it.
Normally, official_name=* is where a name would go if the authority in charge of the place has designated a name in spite of common usage. This feature had an official_name=*, but I removed it in favor of nat_name=*, reg_name=*, and loc_name=* after there seemed to be consensus around this proposal. Since then, Alaska has continued to assert Denali as the mountain’s official name, as it has for decades, so we essentially have a geopolitical dispute between a country and one of its states, not nearly the first time this has happened.
Since the mountain is in Alaska, I think the national/regional/local scheme is adequate for clarifying the scopes of the two names. This doesn’t mean the names aren’t official. However, this approach could prove inadequate if other states or countries begin to designate their own names for the mountain in English. So far, the only other state I’m aware of that has taken a stance is Oklahoma, though it’s unclear if the official who made that pronouncement ever put it in writing. Iowa and Tennessee also have pending legislation about it. If these efforts succeed, we can switch to the same solution as with the Gulf: official_name:en-US=*, official_name:en-u-sd-usak=*, official_name:en-u-sd-usia=*, etc. All of these locale codes are based on fairly obscure provisions in the technical standards we’re following, so some data consumers will need to fix bugs in their parsers to recognize these tags.
As of version 67, name=* and name:en=* are both set to Denali, while Mount McKinley appears only in nat_name=* and old_name:en:1896-2015=*. As both of these dates are somewhat misleading or at least lack the necessary nuance, I’d favor moving Mount McKinley and its translations from old_name:*=* to alt_name:*=*, where they’re more likely to be accessible to geocoders. I’ll let others weigh in on whether we should then swap name=* and alt_name=*, but I’d personally place some weight on the local situation, since OSM has a fairly unique focus on mapping what’s on the ground, even despite other maps usually say.
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Linguists swear by Google Books Ngram Viewer for tracking language evolution, since there isn’t really an alternative. According to this tool, Denali eclipsed Mount McKinley in both American English and English internationally around 1970, a few years before Alaska designated Denali as the official name, based on much older usage in indigenous languages.
Note that Ngram Viewer only tracks occurrences of words in print, not in other media. Also, it can’t distinguish GMC’s line of trucks, but that had at most a minor effect on usage after its introduction in 1998.
Admittedly, I didn’t even know the name Denali growing up in Ohio in the ’90s, but that may have had more to do with Ohioans’ enduring pride in its home state presidents (and maybe also my school’s enduring use of old maps and textbooks). There’s at least a serious argument for making both names readily accessible, even if one of them seems to be more common these days according to the numbers. I’d even suggest name=Denali;Mount McKinley if the statistics weren’t so lopsided these days.
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