Common country name

Hi,

I started to think recently that it might make sense to change “name” tag value of your country from “United States of America” to just “United States”. Here’s why I think that:

  • the OSM wiki tells that name tag should include “common default name” (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Names#Key_Variations)
  • the name of Wikipedia article in English is https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States (also in definition: “commonly known as the United States”)
  • I guess “United States of America” belongs rather to official_name (example from OSM wiki: official_name=Principat d’Andorra (where “name” is name=Andorra))
  • it would be similar to the UK case: name=“United Kingdom”/official_name=“United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland”

What do you think about it?

I have no opinion, but such a change should first be discussed further with all other channels such as
OSM talk mailing list https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
OSM US talk mailing list https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-us
Slack US https://osmus-slack.herokuapp.com/

And even then, there are people who don’t follow any of those discussion lists and may object.

Thanks, I’ve sent the message.

Of course there will always be people not aware of it, but that doesn’t mean that change is not possible. I have already made such change for Russia some time ago and I have heard no serious objections against it - and the tagging has been not reverted, even if that’s visible for everyone.

The ‘name=*’ tag has recently been reverted to ‘United States of America’. Was this the result of discussion or just someone acting on their own?
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/62287607

Thanks for noticing.

I’m not aware of any discussion beside this thread. Also it’s quite fresh mapper and he/she doesn’t use changset comments, so probably some communication will be needed.

Hi there!

Just to let you know, it was changed again. This time another unexperienced user. Or am I wrong?

Check out https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/62480576

She was just adding int_name=United States of America, name tag has not been changed. It’s defined on wiki as:

so it is not clear if it has to be common name, official name or anything else. At least this is not just plain wrong and I have no plan to change it, but maybe you’d like to decide.