On 2014-07-18 09:27 AM, Andreas Goss wrote:
I think for most of the mappers (including me) English is not their
primary language and I'm not sure what kind of mix of
British/American/out-of-the-blue/simply-wrong words I'm using.
At least in Germany (or at my school) there was a huge emphasis on
using British English and using habor instead of habour or center
instead of centre was flat out wrong. So in OSM I would always use
that spelling, because that I would assume that is how it is supposed
to be spelled.
Something I've noticed as an American that works with many foreign
nationals is that the majority of people who learn English in a foreign
country seem to learn British English - my sample may be biased since I
work with a lot of people from India, which is a former colony, but
amongst people from China and Germany for example I am also used to
seeing the British spellings.
Even being part of the (small around here it seems) group that's
inconvenienced by it, I think that it's important that the project
standardize on British English. In the case of existing tags people will
hopefully tend to use the spelling that's already predominant, but new
tags are being added at such a rate that it's still an issue.
In the case of jewellery vs. jewelry (the former of which upsets my
en_US spellchecker), I would encourage automatically correcting
"jewelry" as a spelling error. Yes, there is value to looking at what
tags currently exist, but people who are writing queries against the
dataset shouldn't have to write several other queries just to take a
guess at which spelling is the "accepted" one.
---
Jesse B. Crawford
Student, Information Technology
New Mexico Inst. of Mining & Tech
https://jbcrawford.us || je...@jbcrawford.us
https://cs.nmt.edu/~jcrawford || jcrawf...@cs.nmt.edu
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