Confirmed it doesn’t work on Safari. Michal - I did relink to the images hosted by you, thanks for this! Can you confirm if they appear fine on your end now?

How cool is that. Maybe I’ll finally learn Overpass thanks to this! Thanks so much.

Hi,

Depends how you define a ‘neighbourhood’ :)

I invite you to explore osm.wiki/Key:admin_level as well as osm.wiki/Template:Admin_level_10 - there is a specific entry on Canada, in case that helps. It seems that depending on the city, it may be level 9 or 10.

Thanks both, I’ll test it again with Safari later today and replace the images if needed.

Hi Michal,

Many thanks for this work - this is really interesting and helpful. Thanks to you providing all your working files, I was able to write a follow-up with some adjustments here

Bravo Mapper,

I think that your recommendation

The tag (namage) of any vicinity or town or neighborhood or village might be written in the language of the population or at least the majority

sounds pretty much exactly like the standard OSM procedure:

It should be the most prominent signposted name or the most common name actually used to refer to a given object, almost always in the local language(s).

A good way is to always look for signposts, for example

I wonder what do the others think?

Hello, thanks for this - this is very helpful!

Can you please explain a little more what you mean by:

but for the tag (Name) I recommend a great thing which is based on satisfaction ツ

Thank you naveenpf,

This is helpful, I will use some of these tricks myself.

One tool I have tried before when looking for users to build a community was http://resultmaps.neis-one.org/oooc - perhaps you find it interesting too?

Regards

If everyone prefers, I can start with a few points of my own. All of these are just subjective, so please feel free to discuss and disagree - in fact, this is the point to do so.

1. While English is one of the most common languages used in OpenStreetMap, the project is meant to be multilingual - both in terms of the geographic data, as well as the working communities. However, I, for one, cannot hold this conversation in any of the local languages, so if you want me to participate at least in the beginning, we can start in English. Then at some point we can move to one or all of the local languages. I know this is not ideal, but for me it is not possible otherwise. If you prefer to discuss in any other language, please do so.

2. For me personally the main objective of this conversation would be to stop situations where people change names back-and-forth because they each have opinion on what is ‘right.’ In fact, everyone may have good reasons, but are unwilling to compromise. I’d like to have such a compromise established, and enough people agree to it that it becomes stable.

3. For this to work, we need to have a lot of people participate from the beginning, hear different points of view, and agree on a system that perhaps isn’t perfect for any one individual, but is a compromise that works well for most. Particularly, it would be great to make sure that speakers of Sorani, Kurmanji, Neo Aramaic (Chaldean and Assyrian), Gorani, Azeri/Turkomen and Arabic (have I missed any other?) all could contribute. I’ll try to invite more people to this discussion, but please also do so if you can.

4. Since we are talking about writing names, it is important to distinguish between language (e.g. English, Sorani, Russian, Chaldean Neo Aramaic) and script (e.g. Latin, Persian, Syriac). There are ways of transcribing and transliterating between various combinations of the above, but it looks to me that the easiest thing is to have a one-to-one relationship between languages and scripts. For example:

   Language	Script	Example	OSM iD Editor name
   Kurdish - Sorani	modified Arabic - Sorani	ھەولێر	Central Kurdish
   Kurdish - Kurmanji	modified Latin - Hawar	Hewlêr	Kurdish
   Chaldean	Syriac	ܐܲܪܒܹܝܠ‎
   Assyrian	Syriac	ܐܲܪܒܹܝܠ‎
   Arabic	Arabic	أربيل	Arabic
   English	Latin	Erbil	English
   Russian	Cyrilic	Эрбиль	Russian
   …	…	…	…

   I think it is especially likely to have confusion here when someone uses “Kurdish” label when editing OSM - which refers to Kurmanji - but the types the Sorani name:

5. A few years ago I started working on this topic and came up with a rather complex example, which I now think can be simplified to match the table above.

6. OSM allows tagging each language separately, explicitly specifying which language any given name is in (name:ku, name:ckb). But of course there is also the main name tag, which according to OSM rules should be in the local language. This could mean to confusing situations. For example: Duhok main name could be in Kurmanji (Hawar script), but Erbil main name would be in Sorani (Sorani script) - so a situation where two of the main cities in KRI have main names in different languages. Following this thinking, Christian villages in KRI where for example Chaldean is the main language, should have the main name tag in Chaldean. Another solution could be trying to put together multiple languages in the main name tag - it is used for example in Morocco. Yet another solution could be to try to agree on a single language to use across KRI, which would also have its own upsides and downsides.

7. A lot of my thinking is informed by comments made by Ghybu (on the wiki)[osm.wiki/Talk:Iraq] when I first started asking questions about this topic. Many thanks to him for this, and I really hope he joins this conversation.

8. Finally, a point that I think will be the most difficult to have all the OSM users agree on, which is handling of Arabic names. Arabic is official language for Iraq, and one of official languages of KRI. Internationally, KRI is recognised as part of Iraq, and Arabic names are often used for many places in KRI. Additionally many historical data specify Arabic names for places inside KRI. My opinion is that it is useful to keep these names in OSM under the name:ar tag (not the main name tag), and that removing Arabic names from places in KRI is not helpful.

So to conclude, let me know your opinions on:

• what are the various local languages that should be kept in OSM?
• what do you think should go into the main name tag? Which language?
• is it easy enough to agree on OSM languages meanings: “Kurdish” means “Kurmanji” and “Central Kurdish” means “Sorani”?
• what do you think about using name:ar to have Arabic names for places in KRI?

Thank you to everyone for responding!

subamiche, @$O, Ahmad-0772, Bravo Mapper - would you like to maybe start with providing your first point of view on how do you think names in KRI should be tagged? There is a lot of background resources we can look at for this, but maybe the best thing would be to first get your ‘raw’ ideas, if you agree?

I think for now comments in here are fine, if we need later we can create an OSM wiki page.

Thank you for the link Leonie, most helpful.

Can you please say if there’s a plan to fix the temporary place=refugee_camp tags? There are still hundreds of them in OSM, and literally the first one I checked today is an example of actual damage done to the valid tagging system by replacing place=village with place=refugee_camp.

Regards

@Léonie Miège

On your point:

Finally, the data is already available on UNHCR-curated public database so there is not risk on their privacy here.

Could you please point me to the specific database and layer you are referring to here?

Many thanks in advance

Thank you Leonie for taking the time for this detailed explanation, it is very appreciated.

Indeed, as you say, I would recommend Organized Editing policy compliance, as it would likely address both the issues I’ve noticed, as well as at least some of your internal challenges.

Thanks for all your work, and looking forward to seeing more results of camp/site mapping in OSM.

Thanks for the challenge!

For your first point, you are probably looking for the diff setting. Using the same example.

As for the difference between out; and out geom; - one will return more concise data - so for example just the OSM way element with reference of the nodes it is built from - while the other will return complete geometry of all the elements. To see this, you have to switch to the Data tab on the right-hand side of the OT interface.

ABZ_OSM, if you want to trace a deleted issue, the easiest is probably to use http://overpass-turbo.eu/ to find the feature matching the tag you’re after (so I guess the tag of the chemical plant), and run the query to show the state of the planet at a specific point in time (so ideally right after you mapped it). It should then return a node/way ID that you can use to audit its history, even though it does not appear in the live OSM database anymore.

For example, consider this query showing a refugee camp and compare to this one, which shows what the OSM looked like 2 minutes before. I accidentally created a duplicate that I removed later, but the second query shows both points. You can click the node, and then in the popup click the node ID (so in this case 7676579280) and then select “view history” to see what has happened to this feature in the past even though it is now deleted.

Hope this helps

Hi ABZ_OSM,

I think there are a lot of issues to unpack in here - the OSM community who want to see the data fit into their (possibly subjective) interpretation of what the rules and standards are, the local community living next to a strategically or nationally sensitive facility, the international aid community using OSM as their data platform… all of these are complex in itself.

As for the example you mention - it could be the locals who deleted the plant, or it could be anyone else in the country - or outside of it - that knew of its sensitive status and just checks in every now and then if it didn’t get mapped by someone. In some countries mapping military installations at all is completely prohibited, in others even using a map that has military installations on it is illegal.

I’m not sure if there is a specific question in your message that you’d like me to answer?

Hello Talib,

Thanks for your edits. Can I offer a couple of comments on how it might be possible to improve the data quality a little?

1. I can see you marked the village as both a point, and an area. Generally, we try to stick to the one feature - one element rule. Could you remove either the area or the point? If you want the name to appear on the default OSM map, then the point has to stay as the area place names are not rendered currently

2. Don’t put the “village” word in the name of the village. Your point is already marked as a village, there’s no need to write that it is a village again.

3. I think that the primary language used in the area is Sindhi? In that case, it would make sense to write “ڳوٺ حاجي علي محمد راھو” in the main name tag, and you could use “Haji Ali Muhammad Rahu” in the English name tag

Hope this helps

Rasti,

Can you elaborate exactly what is your idea of how to name villages and cities?

By the way, I know you know Enlgish, Arabic, Sorani… do you know other languages? Farsi?

Congratulations!

Hey, thanks for commenting and for the links, I’ll be sure to have a good look.

The thinking behind this is not for rendered map legibility, but rather for having query-able dataset, even if not rendered by most OSM derived products.

In Iraq pretty much all the names have been transliterated in some official level with varying degree of success, so I guess you can call these ‘English’ names - although they aren’t really.

Automated transliteration is consistent and nice, but pretty much never produces the same results as appear on Latin road signs on the ground.

I put some more details here: osm.wiki/WikiProject_Iraq - obviously very much work in progress.