Country Naming Dispute Issues

I have noticed that that in the welcoming main page for Project Macedonia name of the country was change from Macedonia to FYROM.
Somebody also have change the name of the relation of Macedonian Border #53293 from Македонија то ΠΓΔΜ which is abbreviation of the name recognized by Greece and all addresses by Nominatium was with this abbreviation.
On the same relation is also lot of changes of some ways where name of the country is also changed to FYROM, PGDM and other names from users from Greece.
On the same way name of the highway A1 was also deleted because somebody doesn’t like the name Alexander of Macedonia for the name of this highway.
There was also changes in the name of the capital of the country and some object in Skopje from users from some other countries with the names which they like more than the correct names.
Some of this changes are corrected and reverted but some are still existing.

I like to remind all OSM users and friends with goodwill who want to help in improving of the mapping of Macedonia, without distinction from which country they are coming, with some basic rules of mapping if they have any naming disputes:

  1. For all naming disputes please follow OSM rules
    http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disputes

and map by the OSM good practices recommendations
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Good_practice

and use the On the Ground Rule for mapping
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Disputes#On_the_Ground_Rule_On_the_Ground

  1. All Disputes are considered to be a form of Vandalism in OSM community
    http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Vandalism

and OSM have response to them
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Vandalism#Vandalism_response

  1. If you want to use names recognizable by UN please follow this rules
    http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_United_Nations_political_boundaries

  2. For a names acceptable for your countries add
    name:gr=
    name:eu=
    name:un
    ref:un=

and later render map with your favorite names.

If you are not able to follow this rules, by your political, national or any kind of reason better do not helping us.
Try to map just in your country or go and help in mapping in some other country where you don’t have problem with names.

Please be constructive don’t be destructive.

at first you could tell me about any problems you have in private and THEN come in here (just common politeness)

i am not here to fight, if you d like that you are in the wrong place

if i was constructive and did whatever i like i would call it Monkeydonia, but i am not

i was trying to help, because your country is not very well mapped

It was lot of changes lately, with bad connotation.
I din’t put any name and didn’t address this to nobody.

I wouldn’t classify ‘Monkeydonia’ as constructive in any way and suggest to restrain from sneers like that in future posts. Whatever tensions there are between countries, OSM is not the place to fight over them. Vandalizing the map on purpose will result in a block or ban as does inappropriate behavior on the forum. This is a warning to everyone.

I saw similar changes from Macedonia to FYROM on the wiki pages of OSM. But now they are ok.

Yes, the Data Working Group is monitoring the situation.

So far so god, I fix everything what I see, no new attempts for changing, renaming or deleting.
On some lower zoom layers than 13 rendering still shows bad names ( for example capital city is still wrong Скопље , instead of correct name Скопје), but name is fixed and soon and this layers will be fine.

Just checking - is the name of https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/2460455 correct? Currently it is “Скопски Регион” and it has fewer language names than I’d expect. https://www.openstreetmap.org/relation/2439740 (“Град Скопје”) similarly has fewer language names than I might expect given the “fluid” recent history of the region.

This names are correct. Скопски Регион - Skopje Region is part of administrative division of the country with this name.
City of Skopje ( Скопје) have special status and is made by few municipalities.
City of Skopje is higher administrative division than municipality but lower than statistical region and it’s only one, and unique in the country.

Hi,

I would like to apologise on behalf of the Greek OSM editors for the horrific actions by AKargiola recently. I alerted the DWG this afternoon and they intervened in a timely manner.

The edits by the said user disproportionately prioritised the Macedonia naming dispute over reality to a point where the user deleted valid Macedonian names (name:mk) in our country in retaliation against the Republic of Macedonia.

As much as the Greek politicians may be annoyed by the naming dispute, it isn’t for OpenStreetMap to be so worked up about because the Republic of Macedonia and the Macedonian language still exists on the ground, and I respect your existence.

So to make up for that drama, let me enquire as to whether you would like to have “name:gr” changed to the short name (currently as “short_name”), and that ΠΓΔΜ thing moved to “name:UN”.

Ultimately, it seems the most logical and realistic thing would be along the lines of:

name:en=Macedonia (or for some languages, the equivalent of “Macedonia (country)” but only if the region of Macedonia is styled as “Macedonia (region)”)
official_name:en=Republic of Macedonia (no gimmicks, no dancing ladybirds and absolutely no penguins)
name:UN:en=the former Yugoslav Republic of Macedonia

TL;DR: I never got the whole idea behind this FYROM thing: the Republic of Macedonia is just that: the Republic of Macedonia.

– ika-chan!

My greetings guys,

lately I received a complain regarding how to map in Greece based on what a neighbor country wish to.

When you ask someone to respect your self-determination means that you respect him back. Beyond any policy this should be a pillar for a true “open” and free community.

For this reason I prefer not to continue anymore contributing to a pseudo-open mapping platform and resign. So live your myth!

And one last hint: Greeks are more dumb than you may think and they will still support you while others want to tear you apart in order to apply Divide & Rule policy in Balkans… (you probably not believe me right now but please recall this post when this happen)

Kind regards
AKargiola

PS @ika-chan! Noone argued here about FYROM or Republic of Macedonia.
On the other hand you cannot name as “macedonian” a Slavic script which first appeared not before 900AC while ancient macedonian kingdom founded in 800BC and ended in 200BC (using a simple math expression x=900-(-200) x=1100 years, in other words the time between ancient Cyrillic script appeared and today!!!). These are true scientific facts.
So we can argue if someone who lives somewhere can be named as macedonian or not, but regarding linguistic issue only a politically biassed “realistic” approach can support this. Unfortunately this is has nothing to do with logic.

We have to choose though… Politics or Truth? History or Mapping? For me it’s crystal clear