Well, I would still use what is on the street signs on the ground for name=* (ignoring clear vandalism like broken / defaced parts of signs). Other names go in other tags (name:en_GB, name:en_IE, name:ga, int_name, nat_name, reg_name, loc_name, alt_name, …)
In Italy, in some places there have been OSM name disputes about “how official” some signposts are. I could go on; there are plenty of other examples.
Well, those signposts are still on the ground, so they are what the user on the ground will see, and should IMHO thus be mapped as name=*, even if they are perhaps not worthy of official_name=* tag.
But also note that I’ve linked to https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Multilingual_names which has specific sections for each local country consensus which should always take priority if it exists (for example, in Croatia we’ve decided to use exclusively Croatian names in name=*, and add name:it=* or name:sr=* etc. - even for areas which have dual-lingual signage), regardless of what global OSM consensus (or lack thereof) might be.
In Ukraine, some streets that might have officially been called one thing a few months ago are now called something else following the Russian invasion.
That’s one of the reasons why we do not edit there currently. See Russian–Ukrainian war - OpenStreetMap Wiki.
Also see OSMF Disputed Territories Information.pdf which says that we should generally use “on the ground” name=* (or at least that is how I read it):
Names
The OpenStreetMap community operates under the “on the ground” principle. If a name appears
on the ground, for example a street sign, then that is the preferred name to use since a
navigation system that does not use the same names as those that are signposted is just clearly
impractical. This is recorded as a “name” in our database and is the one generally used on our
main example map.However, we recognise that different national, ethnic, culture or language groups may utilise a
different name. We accommodate this by providing the facility for contributors belonging to
different groups to record what they see as the name for a particular feature. For example,
“name:en” records the name used by the English speaking community and “name:es” that
employed by the Spanish speaking community. The Spanish community can then make a map
using “name:es” in preference to the generic “name” or “name:en”.We encourage different groups and communities to use our data, collect and contribute data
important to you, and to make your own maps that are harmonious with your general usage,
culture and legal system.
I’ve hinted at it before, but to be clear – there will always be people unhappy with what name is displayed by default (unless you display all of them – and then there still be even more people unhappy why are you cluttering the map, or why are you using one order and not the other, or why are you displaying aggressor names by default at all in attacked country etc).
The best we can likely do is to finally implement vector tiles on osm.org (and hope other apps will do that too), and then have user preferences which names and scripts ( name:hr? name:en? name:zh? name:uk? name:ru? loc_name? offical_name?) the user prefers to see (and in which order if they prefer to see them, if there are multiple of them).
And even then, I foresee that the users won’t be completely happy, as ideal name displaying combination is:
quite complex set of preferences
Example of ideal name displaying preferences for me
- if inside Croatia, prefer
name / loc_name / official_name / alt_name. Do not show “/” if one of them is missing (or skip it if same as the others). Fallback toname:hrif both are missing. Fallback tonameif still no name. - if not inside Croatia, show first of those
name:hr,name:bs,name:sr-Latn,name:si,name:en. If none of those exist, take first ofint_name/name:sr/official_name/name/loc_name/name:uk/name:ru, and transliterate it to Latin script if it is using non-latin script.
Having map allowing me to set preference of that level of complexity, would probably make me mostly happy with displayed names (although I’m quite sure I’d found quite a few tweaks to that if implemented).
I do not see any reasonable combination of checkboxes that would allow me to express those preferences; instead it would likely need to be some small snippet of personalized code.
Or (more likely in osm.org map case) be extremely simplified (e.g. just an ordered list of preferred languages: “hr”, “bs”, “si”, “sr-Latn”, “en”) - which if implemented would require automated mass-edit to duplicate all name to name:hr if missing in Croatia, for map to be usable to average Croatian at least somewhat better than current situation).