A “so far recap:” (yes, I’ve skipped some, hopefully minor things, feel free to re-inflate them)
It’s a lone mapper thing and de facto accepted practice, at least from a USA/Canada/North American (México, too? unclear) perspective (I think that’s “about” what Zeke meant). I’ll toss in that adding México and/or saying “North America” couldn’t hurt (add Spanish and some other languages, which is already done with French and some other languages with Canada). There is a trend towards “all of North America” when two of USA, Canada and México are discussed about “how we do things ‘around here’”).
These (native names using / slash characters) are added by non-locals, largely one, who doesn’t seem to get a lot of input "from the people of the land,"now widely noticed, thanks to Minh for pulling tight focus on this. “Engaging local tribal communities in mapping their own lands” is an expressed ideal. The “sense of stewardship” in our map “as ours to present, with honor” now lies before us. We’ll want to tag our best to map our best.
name:lang tags seem a solid, established method, though sometimes getting which dialect is correct can challenge. I’ll toss in this might be where a scholar (see the recent talk-ca thread [Talk-ca] First Nations reserve naming) or those with “already some overlap” here (these topics, these sorts of conversations) could step in and help people chat together…which ISO codes of this or that dialect are correct, reducing cultural friction perhaps, kind of stuff. Someone listening on the OSM side to structure that into a “start here” approach can work. Really, the more who listen, the more the ball can roll towards good motion. It may be three or four people who can nod heads together, it may be a whole band of people take a vote in a meeting, “we’ll see.”
Sometimes, alt_name is used, downstream users of our data should know that. We might want to say that descriptively and take pause to invent something prescriptive, or not, and remain in “observe and learn” mode. There are a lot of possible directions we could and already are going in and this really is a highly fluid kind of design, exceedingly difficult if not impossible to predict well. We really must be (at least partly) very much in listening mode.
Semicolons can work when “a name tag does have more than one name in it” and slash character / is a tagging error. “Semicolons seem here to stay.” The characters solidus / space hyphen - and octothorpe # have been called out as “do not use these in names” (they are old separators we want to replace). Many downstream data users “cope with” semicolons reasonably predictably well. Establishing (as a line of “the paint has dried hard”) that semicolon is a separator as we are describing here causes some downstream ripple in things like JOSM and Osmose. Unicode / mixed directional text and other difficulties (perhaps invisible or quoted characters are necessary in some cases / contexts) complicates this.
In some cases (e.g. rendering text for map tiles) some of this can be done with tweaks to Lua profiles. The slash character / is used in political and cultural distinctions on multiple continents and for multiple reasons.
A “best initial seed case” scenario might be a name:xy=* tag in the local preferred language, plus a name=* tag in “English” (that might be Canadian English, US English, Australian English…) as is OSM’s convention to tag a name=* in English, if possible and appropriate. Other (any?) languages are welcome to be added. Slash characters are to be avoided (along with hyphen, spaces and octothorpe) going forward. Let’s think about how we might communicate intended changes (like deprecating slashes) to downstream users and bump it around.
It seems like there is some fairly wide understanding about this (hundreds of views of this topic). Can someone else take the baton away from me about now and keep running this towards a finish line? It may actually turn into something like a mechanical edit (to filter out slash characters…) as an earlier step. Maybe a middle step.
Stepping away…