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.