Procedure for large-scale changes?

Good day,

I’ve noticed inconsistencies in the naming of streets/avenues across Edmonton, Alberta, Canada. In maybe half of the cases, a name includes “North-west”, and in other half, it includes “NW”. I’d like to help make the names consistent (probably NW, since that’s how people normally write addresses here).

Is there a procedure for making such large-scale changes? Are there per-city discussion pages? (If not, I think that would be a useful addition, and the link could appear near “View”, “Edit”, “History”, at the top of the page…)

Thanks!

This sounds like a job for a bot (eg. xybot).

Thanks for the suggestion. It’s good to see that something already exists to help with this type of change; otherwise, I was going to consider writing something myself.

By procedure, I was more wondering whether I should talk with someone prior to making the change. My idea of what’s right might differ from someone else’s idea.

Thanks again.

… and that said, the widespread inconsistency is clearly wrong. I can justify the change to the abbreviated form in many ways, e.g., it’s the convention used by Canada Post. If someone felt strongly for the long form, we could always discuss and come to a consensus. Cheers!

In OSM in general we avoid abbreviations. This is because we try to provide a globally usable dataset. Especially usable without having to know a bazillion different languages. That said some local communities can decide to do it differently, because OSM is quite an anarchy.

On the wiki there is a page for Canadian best practices, which you might want to follow:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Canadian_tagging_guidelines
It says to write the streetnames out in full.

Thank you very much! That link will be a great reference for me.