Restructure wiki page key:name?

General talk
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Rob: rewriting an English article while ignoring English grammar is ridiculous.

This entire discussion, and your entire premise, has devolved into ridiculous circular reasoning. You’re persistently wanting to use the term proper name—in English—in the context of how it’s used in German, Latin, French, Spanish, etc.—and quite pointedly not how it’s used in English—because you want to make it easier for an online translator to translate the English article into German and other languages.

You are wrecking English comprehensibility in the name of (AI) translatability: that is, quite frankly, nuts. I have to agree wholeheartedly with Zeke:

I’ll go a step further and say that not only is that “not a good reason”: that’s a horrendous reason to change it.

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Google Translate is notoriously poor at translating into German specifically. For what it’s worth, it correctly translates “proper noun” and “common noun” in the two other languages I speak (Spanish and Vietnamese). DeepL is reputed to be better with German, but it’s a less mature service, so maybe there are bugs in some cases.

In any case, I think we need to remember that there already is a German version of the article. If German-speaking mappers prefer to consult the English-language documentation over the documentation in their native language, maybe there should be a discussion about why that is. Do the German pages have a reputation for being outdated or harder to understand than the English ones? Do editors make it too difficult to access the German pages? (It’s a good thought exercise for any language, of course.)

Some widely spoken languages don’t have very much documentation at all on the wiki, so it’s only natural that they’d fall back on the English-language documentation. However, to the extent that we accommodate these users, we should consider linking out to a more comprehensively translated resource like Wikipedia or Wiktionary. Ideally, we would only devise our own custom definition when no everyday concept neatly corresponds to what we need to document.

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No idea where you got that from :wink: I see varying results from bing, deepl and google, both ways.

All I see here is a person wanting to rewrite the English documentation all the while showing limited command of the English language. I guess the reason is, because the English documentation is taken to be the master/blueprint for translations – an idea that is not only met with joy, see talk about machine translation for the Wiki pages.

Regarding German peculiarities (Not a Germanist speaking): Noun is a grammatical term (Substantiv or Hauptwort in German). Name is not a grammatical term (semantics perhaps?). All names are nouns. The other way around, I do not think so. But it does not matter much, because we uppercase nouns, not just names. I do not think we have “proper nouns”, this just does not make sense and there is no need for it either.

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Regarding German peculiarities (Not a Germanist speaking): Noun is a grammatical term (Substantiv or Hauptwort in German). Name is not a grammatical term (semantics perhaps?).

well there is https://de.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nomen

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Which article are you referring to?
The proposal to restructure the article key:name refers to the main article names. Neither “proper noun” nor “common noun” appear in this very long article (“proper name”, on the other hand, appears several times). The terms “proper noun” and “common noun” are also not used in the current article key:name.

The main article names and the current article key:name make no reference to the grammatical concept. I think this is appropriate and want to keep it in the restructured text.

The vast majority of people (82%) do not speak English. What is ridiculous about the idea of taking this group into account?

The German version has none of the problems we are discussing here. I really wish there was also an EN:key:name (OT).

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But “proper name” seems to be used only in the context of spelling and capitalisation - i.e. it tries to clarify how a name should be entered once you have decided what it is, but does not define what the name should be in the first place. I’m still not fully clear what it means, but it doesn’t really affect the understanding of that article as it is not presented as a fundamental concept.

(Also, I think that article never referred to proper names until lesd than a year ago).

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Yes, we’re getting off-topic here, but just to avoid further misunderstanding: the “Key:name” article is the article in English, primarily intended for English speakers (including yourself – you don’t have to be a native speaker). Yes, it’s unfair that English is the wiki’s default language. The same can be said of many aspects of OSM, including the raw tags’ names. (Language-neutral concept IDs are one of the things Wikidata got right with its ontology.) Someday the powers that be will install the Translate extension and we’ll have more tools for making other languages more accessible.

In the meantime, if there’s a risk that native speakers of any language besides English will misunderstand the article, we can certainly add some text to clarify the unusual situation in English. There’s plenty of precedent for this on the wiki, especially when the major dialects of English disagree with each other. However, nothing I’ve seen in this thread so far suggests to me that English is particularly unusual in the fact that its speakers are more familiar with the grammatical concept of a proper noun than the semantic concept of a proper name. :man_shrugging:

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while the number seems correct, it is still misleading, because it counts also babies and children. If you only count people which are at least 14 years old, the total population number decreases by 26%

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If you don’t understand how ignoring English grammar when writing in English is patently ridiculous then you shouldn’t touch any of the English articles on the wiki.

It’s too bad that your original blog post points out some very valid limitations and problems with the English articles such as they were, but the more you’ve interacted with myself and others in this discussion thread the more you’ve demonstrated your command of the English language is insufficient to make the kind of wholesale changes you want to make.

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Yes, but English is still the most used language!

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Ignoring English grammar is not taking this group into account, it makes their life harder as they need to deal not only with text in foreign language but also with additional idiosyncratic and unusual changes.

If you want to help them: you can improve OSM Wiki translations.

(making article text in English as easy to understand as possible, not using confusing phrases and terms or complex grammar is a good idea! But it is opposite to “ignoring English grammar”)

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I think you read to much into the Wikipedia Article. I counter with etymology, and it rhymes:

Noun and name both the same

Otherwise I am with you, as far as I correctly understood: What goes into the name tag - the name of course!

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我个人，欢迎我们新的中国霸主！

:smile:

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I posted something along that line, but now I consider that out of order. Everybody sometimes messes things up, grammatically, in any language they are capable of communicating. I do not think the openstreetmap Wiki documentation is only for native speakers to amend and enhance.

Parsimony rather than Grammar? What the fuss about “proper”? The name of a feature is how locals refer to it. And not what the operating business is registered with at some authority – don’t you think so?

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I’m not saying one has to be a perfect grammarian. I screw up all the time.

My overarching problem is Rob is saying “I want to rewrite the English wiki so that it’s more easily translated to other languages, and I don’t care that it’s incomprehensible to English speakers”. That’s, as I wrote earlier, nuts.

Rob is trying to rewrite the English wiki so that “proper name” such as it is used in German and other languages is used in the English version of the article, because he thinks that makes it more easily translatable to those other languages and thus “better”, but the fundamental underlying issue—which has been beaten to death already—is that what he’s written does not mean what he thinks it means.

And here’s fundamentally where I think this is a foolish endeavour with a shaky foundation:

Frankly, as a native English speaker: I don’t care.

This is a perfect example of “the tail wagging the dog”. You translating your language’s concept of “name” produces a blurred term in English that does not correspond to what you want it to mean.

Rewrite the German wiki if it doesn’t make sense to you in German. Leave the English wiki alone.

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exactly, or almost (there is also loc_name in case the local name is not the “general” name), the operating entity is mapped as ‘operator’

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Unfortunately, I have not found a solution for “proper name” that reconciles precision and comprehensibility. As a compromise, I have decided in favour of the proposal in Post #110, which corresponds to the wording in the main article “names”.

Changes key:name_v3

  • Replaced “proper names” with “names”
  • Reference to “proper nouns” with a footnote
  • section “Editors” added

I have the feeling that we are nearing the end of the discussion and that it is time to prepare the next steps:

  1. a summary of the discussion and
  2. a poll.

Of course, the discussion remains open for further concerns.

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I hate the term “proper name”. It didn’t make sense when I learn English grammer in elementary school. If I don’t understand the subtle meaning as a native speaker, why would those not familiar with the language.

Lets use more straightforward definitions;

Brand: corporate or institutional name
Official; unique name given by a governmental agency or branding entity. It would appear on tax and other legal documents
Local; name given by people local or intimately familiar location. Usually involves some history, geography features and possibly some humor
Name; original name key; treat as the generic version of the key.

I believe these are simpler and clear definitions. Though if someone wants to continue with “proper name”. Then have someone from TeachOSM to find an English teacher to give a better explanation.

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Summary of the discussion ‘Restructure wiki page key:name?’

Part 1 of the discussion focussed on the objectives of the restructuring, primarily readability and clarity. The concept was supported by a majority (4 out of 5).

In part 2 of the discussion, the focus was on the specific text proposal. Within 32 days, 21 authors wrote 73 contributions. The most frequently addressed topics were

  1. brand: 73 times
  2. proper name: 25 times
  3. translation: 12 times

Brand
The pointed wording in the proposal was rejected by a majority (16 to 2). The text proposal was then revised and the use of the brand name was described neutrally.

I was surprised by the great response to brand=name, because it is actually a marginal topic (in my neighbourhood it is only 2.1% of the named objects, N=27407). In order not to fuel the discussion any further, I have not replied to some interesting posts. These are not forgotten, I would like to come back to them later, in a separate discussion thread.

Proper name
The term ‘proper name’ has not found favour in the English language community. The term was rejected by a majority (12 to 1). The text proposal was then revised and ‘proper name’ was replaced by ‘name’.

Translation
Taking translatability into account has triggered very different reactions, from vehement rejection to cautious approval. The reason was the question of who the English-language text is primarily aimed at: To the English language community? To the global OSM community?

Resume
The reason for the structure of my reference, the main article “names”, was a mystery to me for a long time. The trigger for understanding was Post 106 - it’s pure empiricism. Less empiricism and more systematics, that is the core of the proposal.

The principle is expressed very nicely in Post 121:

The name tag will usually contain a proper noun, such as “McDonald’s”, not a common noun, such as “restaurant”, or a description, such as “a fast food restaurant that specializes in hamburgers”

I think the proposal is now mature enough to be put to the vote.

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However much I appreciate short and sweet, I guess I will have to oppose the proposal. Just skimming https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:name there are sections that point at (settled?) disputes and I prefer not to such subtleties getting lost in this overhaul.