street names in Israel have several fundamental problems

I haven’t received that much feedback about the problems I specified.
So here again a kind of summary… Please give me a feedback of your opinion. Otherwise it doesn’t make sense to work through so much data and update OSM without taking about this and that problem right away.

1. Street name translations not standardized

Eric22: (?)
yrtimiD: (?)
Mr_Israel: I would try to standardize the street names in some kind of way. I would recommend to use a standard translation and don’t care about the translation written on the street sign.

Current situation:


מנדלי מוכר ספרים        Mendele Mocher Sfarim
מנדלי מוכר הספרים        Mendele Mocher Sforim
מנדלי מוכר הספרים        Mendele Moher Sefarim
מנדלי מוכר ספרים        Mendele Moher Sefarim
מנדלי מוכר ספרים        Mendelei Mocher Sfarim
מנדלי מוכר ספרים        Mendeley Moher Sfarim
מנדלי מוכר ספרים        Mendeli Mokher Sfarmin

What I would use in all 7 cases:


[name]                [name:he]                [name:he1]           [name:en]                   [name:en1]                 [name:en2]                     [name:en3]                       [name:en4]                  [name:en5] 
מנדלי מוכר הספרים          מנדלי מוכר ספרים      מנדלי מוכר ספרים    Mendele Mocher Sfarim     Mendele Mocher Sforim       Mendele Moher Sefarim          Mendelei Mocher Sfarim           Mendeley Moher Sfarim      Mendeli Mokher Sfarmin

**2. Ha (“ה”) or no Ha in front of the street name **

Eric22: (?)
yrtimiD: (?)
Mr_Israel:
Use the street name as written on the street sign for the “name” tag of the way and translate the words to English.
Please try as much as possible to use name:en1 for the root of the word, to make it easier to find.

Example:
name:en HaGalil
name:en1 Galil

**3. With a apostrophe after Ha (“ה”) or without in the English translation **

yrtimiD: (?)
Eric22:
Nominatim already removes apostrophes when you search - try searching for “Earls Court” and “Earl’s Court”, for each search you will get results with and without apostrophe. I think the name on the sign has to always be one of the stored names. Whether it should be name:en or name:en1, I’d have to think more.

Mr_Israel:
I would like to remove all quotes from the Ha phenomen, no matter what is written on the street sign.
There is no reason to keep it and create even more variations of street names with this strange character.
It shouldn’t matter if the translation is written on the street name with a apostrophe. We should remove all of them from the name:en tag. If you think the information should be still saved, we could save it as name:en1.

Checked manual for osmconvert, and it looks like impossible to output version of the object.
Also, now I know how to convert back your ID values.

I needed the version value to be sure I do not overwrite somebody else’s changes.

So, Mr_Israel, I think you can continue your fixes, and then you’ll finish, I’ll apply all non empty values from changed rows back to the ways and upload them to the OSM.

I’ll actually will prefer the wikipedia variant of translation in name:en (for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mendele_Mocher_Sforim)
also, i’d drop all 100% incorrect variants like “Mendeli Mokher Sfarmin”

I’m really not sure if we need to keep all that strange english varians, I’d keep only one, mostly used translation (if it’s equal to the wikipedia variant)
For hebrew names - must be only one value, as all other are for sure mistaken.

About Ha* and Ha’* I’m really don’t know what is better and right, but for sure we must normalize all to one schema.

So how would you like to decide what version is correct.
With or without “Ha” ?

Example:

מנדלי מוכר ספרים
מנדלי מוכר [b]ה[/b]ספרים

I don’t want to be the one to delete correct value, because I think I’m more accurate than the person that did the editing.
We should try to never loose any data.

Beside that we have also the issue of Jerusalem. Should we translate it to name:en=Jerusalem or name:en=Yerusalaim

This will not be answered by Wikipedia.

And also I’m not sure with “Mokher” and “Moher” and “Mocher”.
iGo for example would use “Mokher”.

IMHO, the version “מנדלי מוכר הספרים” is wrong. But here we do have wiki for answer.
For other cases it’s quite difficult to know what is right, as we all saw many road signs with awful typing errors.
I asked my friend (his mother learned linguistics), so tomorrow we’ll possible get answer about apostrophe usage after Ha.

Let’s for start fix all typing errors and all common errors like:


א.ד. גורדיון (wrong Yud)
אהרונוביץ (no ' at the end)
אירוס ארגמן (for sure must be HaArgaman in hebrew)
אלוף הניצחון or אלוף הנצחון
אריה דולצין or אריה דולצ'ין
all variants of ארלוזורוב must be for sure ד"ר חיים ארלוזורוב
same for ביאליק must be full name and not shortcut
etc...

Ok.

After 2 - 3 hours of work, I have a table with a lot of fixes ready.
There is still a lot left to do in the table, but its very interesting if the upload will be possible that easy or not.
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjoRSMeOZcXDdGFaYjFZcXB6eS1RTVR1RGhmWjI3M2c

Following things have been changed so far:

  1. tried removed all “derech” / “roads” / “streets”
  2. copied from existing translations to missing translations.
  3. If there are several translation types of the same Hebrew spelling I used name:en1, name:en2 etc. and updated this way all roads.
  4. If there where several of a kind of road and there was a existing arabic or russian translation I copied those into other fields.

To Mr_Israel’s questions:

  1. Hebrew - as written on sign. English - For names (of people, places, etc.) - standard spelling according to Wikipedia or other resources, unless there is a note saying “I saw the road sign and the English spelling is ___” or similar.
  2. Same as Mr_Israel above
  3. I change my mind - I prefer without apostrophe, unless there is a note saying “I saw the road sign and there is an apostrophe” or similar.

(I assume that almost all English translations are based on assumptions or general knowledge, not having actually looked carefully at the spelling on the sign.)

Agreed

Not sure about this one. On Tel Aviv street signs there is no ד"ר and I don’t think the average person would think to look for this. And when I search for the address on the Israel post office website (that’s pretty official, no?) it just uses ארלוזורוב in Tel Aviv and Haifa (the only two I checked)! So I think maybe we shouldn’t add first names and titles when they aren’t already there.

If you pronounce “Yerushalayim” you’re probably already using Hebrew letters, and “Jerusalem” is universally known, and it avoids issues with all the Arabs and international people who also consider the city to be “theirs”, so I prefer “Jerusalem”. “Yerushalayim” should be a secondary name.

About name:en
this tag is for rendering map for english speaking people, so if some name have well known english translation - it must be used. And if we have such well known name - all transliterations like “Yerushalaim” unneeded.

If somebody want to review (and update) all city and towns he/en/ar/ru names:
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AolLjmdDjvyydFUySlBiY1NwWUV1dm9wQVBrOVBCTEE

We can use Wikipedia as a resource for this, right?

For checking names and adding wiki links - I think yes.

If for some city we have both node and way with almost same tags:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/27132996
http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/27244120

What would you do?

It’s an area. I suppose an area is preffered to a node, right?

Guys, I need help with http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/node/278470160

Once it was “Bet Ma`on”, but after some update became partly “טבריה עילית”
is this different names for the same place? or a completely different places?

From what I understand (based mostly on Wikipedia): Beit Maon is a name used for the neighborhood immediately surrounding this point. Teveriah Ilit refers to a larger area (basically everything west of Sderot Sapir) with the same center point.

I’m not sure what that means for us, but I think the name Teveriah Ilit is much better known.

but can we call “טבריה עילית” town? or it’s only suburb?

I have created a new table for the first 6000 Israeli roads in two chunks.
This time including the new *.POLY file that yrtimiD posted before (now incl. the settlements).
THANKS FOR THAT ONE!!!

1-3000 => https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjoRSMeOZcXDdDVuOXhKMV8waGpUYlNmMGIxMDNXdHc
3000- 6000 => https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AjoRSMeOZcXDdFhVNGctY0xfME1OM3JESkYtZlVuc2c

There is not that much to do, but still every help is appreciated.

טבריה עילית is only a suburb, I don’t think anyone regards it as a separate city.

I have gone through the first chunk of 1-3000 streets and there are around 45 non translated streets left.
Would be great if somebody could help here.

yrtimiD: I added Russian names for every place in Israel (not counting Arab villages in West Bank), and Arabic names wherever I could.