OSMs first edit war
Live in a disputed area like the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus? How should you name your streets when major governments near you disagree on things like whether they exist?
Such is the dilemma facing David Janda on the talk mailing list:
I am one of two people who are making an effort to map northern Cyprus. For those who do not know, Cyprus is a divided island since 1974. There is the Republic of Cyprus which is internationally recognised in the south, and the Turkish Republic of Northern Cyprus in the north, which is not. For a backgrounder do a timeline in Google.
The issue I have is regarding names of places.
Since 1974 places were renamed, and as an example, the village where I live, and where I have started the project is called Ozanköy (Turkish). Prior to 1974 it was called Kazaphani (Greek). Now, all signs for the past three decades have been in Turkish, and as OSM is used as a navigational aid I have used the Turkish names and Greek as a secondary where applicable. Example:
name=Ozanköy
old_name=Kazaphani
However, after a few days of editing I noticed that one user using Potlatch changed the tag to:
name=Kazaphani
This has been going on for the past week, and it is taking up my time to correct them.
So, what to do? Is there some adjudication procedure with OSM?
Rather than ‘name’ and ‘old name’, why not mark it as bi-lingual?
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Bilingual_street_names
Then you could use:
name:el=Kazaphani
name:tr=Ozanköy
which just reflects the reality of a place having several names.
@pemberton:
Is guess one problem is, that even if bilingual street names are used, currently only the standard name is rendered. A solution would be better mult-ilanguage renderings. I’m will try to do this on the Map of Addis Ababa, Ethiopia for Amharic and English Street Names (www.addismap.com) – but for a different reason (to be foreigner-friendly and local-friendly as well).