On Wed, Mike N wrote: > On 1/20/2016 3:39 PM, Dominic Coletti wrote: >> I see 808,000 uses of name_1 and 65,000 of name_2. > Many of these are from the US TIGER import, and must not be automatically > removed. They would go into alt_name , etc based on local knowledge.
I believe this is a good point to make, the origin for many of those tags. While the number of uses is reason to keep them as-is, if a major slice of them comes from an import, the ratio isn't a good reason to *recommend* entering more of them. Browsing through this thread I didn't notice one point, the fact that with alt_name=a;b;.. all the names are/should be in the semicolon separated list, i.e. even without any processing that separates the parts/names into distinct records, searching would indicate that the searched-for name is within the list of alternative names (in most cases/some countries, not doing some sort of wildcard matching gives a bad user experience, esp. if the local word or abbreviation for "street" is always at the beginning). With name_1 and name_2 and name_9 you'd never know how many tags you have to look for when indexing the db dump and changes. Also, with name_[n] the original mapper and the next mappers have to order the names with reasoning or just how they like them (subjective), whereas with name=The Name + alt_name=other names the alternative names are then equal with each other (a collection of alternative names). What should be in the plain name tag is easier to agree on (especially if the operator behind the named entity can be asked), than it would be to agree on the sorting of the other known names. -- alv _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging