OpenStreetMap
Mountain names. A new front in the never-ending cacophony of US political discourse.
Two recent mountain peaks had their names changed by the US Board on Geographical names and there is disagreement in the change sets on whether the name given should be the new indigenous name given by the US Board or the English translation of the US Board. To be clear though, I have not seen the official name from a primary source.
The two peaks were promptly edited to their new names in the local Dena’ina (North and South Yuyanq’ Ch’ex) but within 24 hours changed to what I assume is the English translation of the new Dena’ina name (North and South Heaven’s Breath).
To me it seems like a cut and dry answer based on osm standards what should fall in the “name=” attribute. The editor that changed it to the English translation may feel otherwise though so and to avoid a change set dispute I emailed the Data Working Group to get their decision. I haven’t heard from them in over 10 days however and I haven’t received a message to my follow up email on whether my email got to them. If anyone is on the DWG is interested in bringing me on to handle these issues, I would volunteer. For now though, I’ll hold off on changing the name back and hold faith in the process.
news article:
relevant changesets:
Diskuse
Komentář od n76 z 31. 10. 2022 v 20:34
I think you are referring to GNIS feature ID of 1412420.
The way I would approach this is to put the official GNIS (Dena’ina Athabascan) name into the name tag. I don’t believe straight translations of names should be used unless they are actually used by locals to describe the feature. I suspect in this case the locals will either use the officially approved Athabascan name or the old Anglo name (much like Denali vs McKinley). But if someone insists on a translation it would probably go into the name:en tag.
I would probably also put the previous name into either the alt_name or old_name tags. It probably wouldn’t hurt to put the official Dena’ina Athabascan name into the official_name tag.
For what it is worth, you can download the GNIS database in a text format easily converted to spreadsheet at https://www.usgs.gov/u.s.-board-on-geographic-names/download-gnis-data but when I looked at the Alaska extract the most recent update was made over a year ago and it does not contain this change.
Komentář od Hans Thompson z 31. 10. 2022 v 21:34
Interesting. The names have not yet been updated and are still listed as Suicide Peaks. Not that this is the end all be all since osm is more de facto then de jure.
Komentář od Hans Thompson z 31. 10. 2022 v 21:40
Nevermind. It says that the names have only been updated to last August and the change was reported to have happened sometime in the last month. Thanks for linking that page. I got lost on their site before looking for the actual database.