This is an editorial matter that will reasonably vary from map to map. Some maps are meant to teach you geography from the comfort of home. Those tend to use translations more heavily. Others are meant to accompany you in the field. Those tend to show what’s signposted. If that’s the priority, then the map should show name=*, not name:en=* or even name:fr=*.
A car navigation system is somewhere in the middle: streets as signposted, POIs translated. You might want to know what to search for in the application. You also don’t necessarily use the signposted names of POIs until you get out of the car.
All of which is to say that the links to Wikidata and resulting translated labels are within the realm of reason, even if they make the map less useful for orienteering.
A translation like “Triumphal Arch” is incorrect because no one uses it as the name of the arch. name:*=* is for real names, not dictionary definitions.
There are, or have been, a number of unhelpful English translations dotted around. Concorde Square, Triumphal Arch, Under the Lindens.
@trigpoint I guess the issue is a wrong wikidata=Q* somewhere as Brandenburg Gate (in Postdam, Germany) is a Triumphal Arch on the Pariser Platz which ends Under the Lindens boulevard.
When the OMT layer was added as a featured layer one of the bugs that needed to be ironed out was using Wikidata names in a way that would confuse users when they looked at the OSM object. It sounds like the bug has crept back into the layer
There was a case of vandalism reported recently on the French forum. The name of a town had been replaced with crude and offensive language. The OSM data was OK at that point, so it seemed to be a case of a rendering which had not yet been updated. But no-one could find the offensive words in the history of the OSM database.
It eventually came to light that the vandalism had happened on Wikidata. The map affected was OMT.
Just to further muddy the waters, I’d just like to point out that Translink’s stations in Northern Ireland have signs outside saying ‘Train station’ rather than ‘Railway station’
I’m also unable to reproduce the issue. Setting the language preference to Spanish, the MapTiler OMT layer shows name=* from OSM, whereas OSM Americana shows Wikidata’s Spanish labels via OSMUS tiles. These light rail stations on the T in Boston only have name=* set:
Wikidata’s Spanish labels here are a right mess. My usual reaction would be to find the responsible Wikidata items and fix them, benefiting not only this map but also other OSM-based maps like Mapbox (and even Google Maps in some languages). From what I can tell, the U.S. community has generally appreciated the opportunity to spot Wikidata cleanup issues through OSM Americana. That isn’t the map’s primary purpose, but enough maps fuse the two sources together that making Wikidata look good helps OSM look good too. After all, we’re the ones demanding to have our name on the map, not Wikidata.
As you can see from the screenshot above, the railway station labeling issue isn’t unique to the UK or France. A couple weeks ago, I went through trimming disambiguating suffixes from stations around the San Francisco Bay Area. U.S. station labels are particularly chaotic because Wikidata imported English Wikipedia article titles before the dust settled on those article titles. My changes caught a local Wikipedian by surprise. In the resulting discussion, there seems to be a general feeling that the natural disambiguators should go. However, I don’t think I convinced my fellow San Franciscan.
So far, no one has forced the issue through a formal request for comments, which would apply everywhere. In the meantime, anyone trimming the labels en masse should be aware that they might be stepping on some toes. Even so, I don’t think getting both projects on the same page would be hopeless.
