Street rename repair request

A while back a user who hasn’t edited since made the following changeset: Changeset: 97112995 | OpenStreetMap

This replaced various street names with others. It’s correct that the official names actually changed but the old names are still (also) signed and used. There was nothing offensive about the old names.

  • Ideally, the old names should have been added to “alt_name” or “old_name”. Can this be done in bulk?
  • Also, if there is a way to search and fix all similar renames, please do.
  • If you can add a link to the relevant page on https://noms-geographiques.app.ge.ch/ that would help too

Thanks for your help.

This should be fairly easy to do with JOSM.
Are all the 32 changed ways double-signed, e.g. show both the old and new name “on the ground”?

Can you provide a list of streets still double-signed? I have no idea how you would track renames in a large scale.

I think this would better be solved/linked by Wikidata ID in both datasets.

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I don’t think this is needed, unless you’d add them differently depending on the “double-signing”. Currently, I’d use “old_name” by default. On day 1, “alt_name” would probably have been the better choice.

The renames are:

  • not limited to the names in this changeset,
  • nor that the changeset includes every way for these names.
    How does one find all the others?

I tried to find the document linked in the changeset, but of course it has changed since…

Luckily the date of the decision was mentioned so I found the information here:

It seems all the name changes decided that day are in the changeset.

If you know about other name changes they were probably decided another day and have to be searched seperately.

To check if all the ways were changed you probably need to search for the old name and see if you get any results.

If you go for old_name I feel it does not need to be signed anymore, for alt_name I would prefer that this name still is signed.

The website I provided links to the relevant decisions. Usually there is one, but for some, there are two as they had to correct some typos. In general, it’s preferable to link to the page on the website than individual pdfs.

If they are not double-signed I would not add old_name, as OpenStreetMap maps the current reality, and not history.
So, if there’s no sign left with the old name then the historic data is out of scope for OSM.

As @Fjellrev said:

This seems to be your own POV. The streets still exist.

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I’d suggest familiarising yourself with the information available on the OpenStreetMap Wiki, for example the Good Practice page, and, on that page, the section “Don’t map historic events and historic features” especially. There’s also a separate wiki page “History” about mapping historical features. Historic street names – especially those that are not signed anymore – are among the features that are meant by those community-established guidelines.

For your endeavours, OpenHistoricalMap might be a better fit: openhistoricalmap.org

There’s also documentation on OpenHistoricalMap on the OSM wiki, and in their separate FAQ, there’s a section “Why can’t I use OSM for historical data?

Of course there are nuances to all of this, but the bottom line of this: “However, in general, the history of the world is out of scope for OSM” (Wiki quote).

If you read through the pages I provided, and perhaps a few more Wiki pages, it should become clear that (again), this is not so much a case of personal views, but established consensus within the OSM community.

(On the off chance that you’re concerned with the history of the OSM data itself, and not maps produced by currently live OSM data, then there are tools for working with historical OSM data: You can still work with historical, no longer valid data that used to be live OSM data using OSM history tools for analysis purposes. But after reading through the other thread, I don’t think that’s what you’re after.)

Overall, I’d like to endorse the suggestion @habi made earlier:

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No, community consensus, as @Mister_Kanister explained nicely and in detail.

Yes, of course. But not their old name.

Let’s keep things in perspective. The section Don’t map historic … states:

Do not map objects if they do not exist currently, and do not map the location of historic events
The object here is the highway.

The main article “History” explicitly mentions that old-name is permissible mapping

In some limited situations, we do map … , while an old_name=* tag on the associated building can indicate the original referent.

Last but not least, old_name has over 900,000 uses (well over a million if you include the language-specific old_name:xy). Significantly more than half of these are in combination with highway=*. This is established tagging.

If the old signs are still up, then it’s perfectly valid. But even if they’ve been removed, locals will still know and often use the old name, especially if the renaming was only a few years ago. It takes at least two or three generations for such knowledge to be forgotten and no longer used.

A clear yes to using old_name.

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I fully agree, if the signs are still up.
If not, in my opinion old_name can stay but is not mandatory.

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Maybe it wasn’t obvious, but the ways in the changeset should all be parts of streets [and not about street signs (which obviously could be deleted when removed)].

Is there any page we can point the person who does the repair to? I mean about street renames in general. About “old_name”, Key:old_name - OpenStreetMap Wiki explains quite well how it should be used.

As for the mentioned search, maybe we should point them to the stitch tool and the osm.ch street name search tool mentioned elsewhere. Possibly it helps too.

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Maybe it wasn’t obvious, but the ways in the changeset should all be parts of streets [and not about street signs (which obviously could be deleted when removed)].

Then it’s really not obvious what you “need” to be corrected.
The name (or old_name) of highways is given by their sign on the ground.

What do you mean by “should all be parts of streets”?

I agree that having the previous names in old_name isn’t mandatory (whether they’re signed on-the-ground or not), but would be useful (and in-scope for OSM) as long as these names are still being used by the local population or the general public.

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