Localisation of place names

I have been inactive with OpenStreetMap for some years. So, hi again!

Recently Wikimedia activated the Kartographer extension which allows integrating OSM-based maps on a wide range of Wikipedia language editions. Wikipedia uses the name:* tags to localise place names on the maps. This means maps that are localised in many different lesser-used languages all around the world. Hopefully this support by the Wikimedia Foundation means that these maps will stay around and will not be victim of the “link rot” that killed so many promising projects by individuals or small groups.

You should be able to roam the world map in any language with a Wikipedia project by changing the language code in this link:
https://maps.wikimedia.org/?lang=fy

So, I guess this is the right time to engage and add some new localisations to place names around the world. The only problem: how do I do that? :laughing:
Or to be more precise: how do I do that efficiently with a tool that is made precisely for the purpose of bulk-adding place names (or properties in general)?

I looked around on the wiki and in other places and I found some old pages like https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Nomino
Nomino seems to be the thing I am looking for. But it is broken…

So, any ideas what tools are fit for the job?

I believe the policy is only provide language variants where they differ from the standard by more than a simple transliteration. Does Wikimedia attempt to transliterate?

I don’t think so. Looking at China on the map I see many places with Latin script names and a few with Chinese script names. That means there is no automatic transliteration at work. But that also means that the OSM database already contains many names that are just transliterations.

What is in place, are language fallbacks. If there is no name:fy tag, the fy (West Frisian) map will fall back to name:nl (Dutch).

But anyway, that is not what I had in mind. What I want to do is to add place names that actually differ by more than just transliteration. And I’m looking for a tool that makes this process more efficient.

It’s easily possible to go to www.openstreetmap.org, hit “Edit” and just add the new name. But it’s slow, I cannot directly see which names are still missing and it’s lots of clicks. What I want is a streamlined tool like Nomino was, but still working :wink:

You can use Overpass to extract for instance, all named places with a ‘name’ tag, but without a ‘name:xx’ tag. Load this into josm and you know that every object is missing a tag.

I tried that. It’s not super-intuitive, but it works. A specialized tool would be cool but I can work with that if there is no specialized tool.

Thank you!

I’ll recommend using JOSM’s Todo list plugin. Once you get the hang of it, you will not want any specialized tool.