Proposal talk:Language information

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language:lg=yes is used on atms and I also use it on shops, pharmacies, doctors etc..

An alternative could be name:html=<html string>. You could use span and abbr tags. --Reclus (talk) 19:59, 10 August 2017 (UTC)

Well, HTML gives of course a great flexibility. On the other hand it’s much more complicate to parse, especially for cartographic usage (for example in Mapnik, the most used rendering engine of OSM). And much more complicate to edit… Sommerluk (talk) 14:19, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Usage of default

Don't indicate it several times.

Example: For the Bulgarian city of Montana use:

name=Монтана

language:name=bg

Usually rendering engines default to Russian Cyrillic, but this city is in Bulgary.

So in this case, language:name=bg has to be put on Bulgaria.

And on the few shops of Bulgarian food in Ireland (as it's not the default language). If you want to put it everywhere, let do a pre-processor do the job in your database, not in main OSM database. --Nospam2005 (talk) 19:43, 14 August 2017 (UTC)

Well, the point is that you cannot determine it from the database. For example: If you default to Chinese (simplified) for China, there will be plenty of cases where this is wrong – there are more languages spoken in China than only Chinese (and not every Chinese is always simplified). Sommerluk (talk) 22:09, 14 August 2017 (UTC)
Absolutely... not! The tag can be set at any admin_lavel=* object. So imagine in Galway County they decide to have the Gaelic language as the default language (again). So on Galway County they put language:name=ga, on Ireland they put language:name=en. Not on every single object, only of the administrative entities having a different default value than the higher entity. And on specific objects if as for the mentioned food shop it's not the rule of the enclosing entity. KISS --Nospam2005 (talk) 13:46, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
Indeed the proposal says “It is not necessary to add language information to most objects and keys in OSM.” ☺️ Sommerluk (talk) 14:29, 15 August 2017 (UTC)
But the sentence is followed by "But in regions where a different language/script combination makes a difference in rendering, it can be useful to add language:name=* to determine the default local language.". It can be understood that in such regions, tagging would be mandatory for every single object. IMHO, the above behaviour (adding the default language on administrative entities) should be highlighted in the proposal.
I’ve slightly modified the sentence in the proposal. Default values for regions (like you suggest) have been discussed various times (not only for language, also for motorway speed limits and so on). I think this proposal is compatible with such an approach, but I would not force it here as this would imply also changes to the admin regions wiki page, which is a little bit out of scope of this proposal, but could be done independently.

Difference to name:<language>=*

what is the difference to name:<language>=* i.g name:de=Golden Gate Brücke ?

There are use-cases where you do not want to use name:<language>=* by policy. One of these use cases is the default map style at openstreetmap.org. They want to use always the default/local names of cities and towns. So it shows the capital of Great-Britan as “London” because that’s in the simple name=* tag. So the capital of Rusia is not shown as “Moscow” but as “Москва”. This proposal is about to answer the question “Which is the language of the default name=* tag?” This question is important, because it makes a difference in rendering for some languages. At http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/Language_information#Rationale it is explained more detailed. (The information might maybe also be interesing for text-to-speach engines.) Sommerluk (talk) 13:48, 30 August 2017 (UTC)