However, I still hope for a more amicable solution. For example, Belarusian community decided to use Russian language in “name” tag in spite of the fact that there are lot of Belarusian street signs in Minsk (I don’t know how it is in other cities). For rendering in Belarusian language they use separate Mapnik server.
What if I see only one of those signs, change the name tag, and will be blocked because of violation of the DWG decision?
Ok, next case. It seems, this sign does not have status part. In both languages name of the street is “Кожанова”, but status part in ukrainian would be “вулиця” in russian “улица”. Should status part be removed from street name completely?
For me personally it would be vandalism to remove status part (based on real sign). One city can have different streets with same name but different status (eg. avenue, street, bystreet). If all status parts are removed, it would be difficult to find desired street/avenue/bystreet.
Граждане, украиноговорящие, хватит высасывать проблему из пальца. Врач сказал в морг, значит в морг. Ни чего плохого с картой и базой не случится, просто всё придёт в соответствие, а не как вы хотели в ваших эротических фантазиях. Не принял ещё народ Крыма украинский, как и на большей территории Украины. Ну и что, что он (украинский язык) навязывается всеми кому не лень, собирая политический капитал. Я в своё время украинский только на 3 кнопке ТВ слышал, да в редких учебных документальных фильмах в школе. И с тех пор всё так же и осталось. Приезжайте, посмотрите.
I believe it would be interesting for woodpecker to read those comments in Russian. They clearly prove that it WAS actually vandalism and that those guys clearly aren’t cooperative.
Dear Frederik, we are dissappointed by this non-decision.
DWG give basically gave a carte blanche to an utter mess in big part of Ukraine.
Open questions are:
-
What to do with cities mapped in Ukrainian from the very beginning? A good example is Alupka, where Vetrov used to start edit wars.
-
What to do when on the ground parts of a street has name in Russian, and another part is in Ukrainian
-
What to do when buildings have Russian spelling, but all of the direction signs are in Ukrainian
-
What to do in other cities. Majority of the country has all of the above problems
As of the resolution itself, you state that “Road signs in the Crimea are often in Russian although it has been claimed that these should, legally, be in Ukrainian (unclear)”, although you were pointed to Ukrainian Constitution, as well as you were told that every citizen of the state has his address spelled in Ukrainian in his passport. You state “Such a solution must necessarily include local mappers … but if they are not included in the solution then the problem cannot be resolved”, but you were told number of times that they deliberately ignore any calls to participate in such solution. You are calling to “Never change the “name” tag unless you have personally been at the place or seen a photo of the particular object and a sign containing the name”, however every participant in the discussion was number of times in Crimea, and many saw personally names in Ukrainian, moreover there are number of open sources such as Yandex Panoramas which could be used even by a foreigner to double check, and you were presented with direct links.
What we were actually seeking is to have a simple statement “Use only Russian, or use only Ukrainian, or put both in the name tag”. On the ground rule will not work. Moreover, mix of the languages will lead a hardly usable state of Crimea map, particularly in address searches.
I expect that in the coming days we will see mass renames of the whole Crimea territory into Russian, despite of any on-the-ground rules, and Ukrainian names never added by the language haters involved in the dispute, since people who were doing some job in the peninsula will be afraid to be banned by non-following these easy to twist whatever way rules.
Just to illustrate, here is my translation of the last message from Kengaru:
I will not comment on the vile language and the utter disrespect, but just have to point out that (1) majority of the participants primarily speak Russian and live in cities speaking Russian, Ukrainian is their second language. This includes everyone of those engaged in the “edit wars” (2) OSM is not place for politics (3) all of us were in Crimea, it is the biggest resort in the country and many of us saw the signs. All of us saw the signs in Ukrainian on Yandex Panoramas which were quoted during the discussion.
Unfortunately, all of the points I mention here were already raised several times, but are being kept silently ignored.
On 31 July 2012 01:24, Frederik Ramm frederik@remote.org wrote:
Dear Eugene, Alex, and mappers in Ukraine and the Crimea,
Gentlemen, I replied publicly on the forums, but now I realised that the person who wrote to DWG was actually CC’ed on this mail. That is Alex mrpsb@bk.ru.
I performed a quick investigation, and was quite amazed, that the person is actually lives in Moscow, Russia.
Here is the chain:
o User ‘Grav’ publishes a request to send a crack, and puts on his e-mail: http://www.sukhoi.ru/forum/showthread.php?t=14328&p=175187#post175187 The site is dedicated to aviation.
o His profile right on that site among other things has: Place of Living: Moscow (Местонахождение: Москва): http://www.sukhoi.ru/forum/member.php?u=1160
o Right there we can see link to his site: http://npcspasop.ru/ where he is an admin, and acts under same nickname. The site is about rescue troops which use helicopters.
o The contact address published there is in Moscow too: http://www.npcspasop.ru/modules.php?name=Pages&go=page&pid=12
o He posts that he found a nice project OpenStreetMap: http://npcspasop.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=544 This also explains his early edits which are in Moscow: http://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Vetrov/edits?page=13
o Judging by his posts, he was living in Russia at least in 2011: http://npcspasop.ru/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=541 (there he encourages to fight with bribery of Russia politics)
o Additional search gives his full name, “Alex Grav” and once again his place of residence, Moscow. These days the page exists only in web archive: http://web.archive.org/web/20031112133615/http://www.squadcenter.net/index.php?p_view=yes&page=13
Nick ‘Vetrov’ roughly could be translated as ‘Windy one’ which completes the puzzle.
This is quite unfortunate and unpleasant that you were fooled even with such basic information of who lives where and as such can judge the truth on the ground.
Eugene
I was in Crimea and can confirm that this is a lie. A lot of TV channels are in Ukrainian there, not just the third one. 
Personally, I support reconsideration of the “Truth on the ground” rule. OSM usually have more info than there is on the ground – post indexes and so on. Sometimes, building have two adresses, but there is only one of them “on the ground”, but everybody who lives there know that it’s dual-addressed. As mentioned by other participants of the discussion, in some countries there is a real mess with street signs and if we end up following them we’ll get a really messy map.
В советские времена было только три канала. Два московских и один киевский.
Третий канал использовался больше для пропоганды советского образа жизни и прославления компартии.
Все новые и интересные фильмы показывали на первом канале а третий был совсем скучный.
I just refute the “since those times everything stays as is” statement.
Мда… Захватывающее чтиво. Аж почти до двух ночи засиделся перечитывая - такой закрученный сюжет. Украинское сообщество, если вдруг действительно где-то кому-то понадобится мнение картографов, проживающих в Крыму, можете обращаться. Я за “букву закона”.
Читали или нет, но начало срача обсуждения тут http://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=12367