I have read the above mentioned discussion[1] (unfortunately it is spread among two mailing lists)
Sorry for that.
(1) Default tags can be changed. We should remember that default tags can be edited by somebody later and they will no longer be good for other languages.
This will mark all all uses of the default name as not ok (in any language)
(2) There is some inconsistency in default tags. Sometimes it's the English name, sometimes it's written in the Latin alphabet, local alphabet (e.g. Arabic) or both. I think Iran is spelt in Arabic, Comoros are spelt in both. Some people say Burma, some say Myanmar for various reasons.
Yes, that's true. The default name should be how the name is spelled in this country (just as it is with city- and street-names). If there are two major languages in this country, both should be supplied.
I think having explicit name:xx tags even if *at the given moment of time* it's the same as the default.
That's said, I have added "name:pl" to "Polska" even thought it is the default name, too. Therefore having "name:de" == "Deutschland" is perfectly fine. In this case it actually indicates that the local official language is Hochdeutsch ("de" or "de_DE").
There is afaik no difference of in the spilling of "Deutschland" within all de_*-languages, only in pronunciation, but if there would be on, it would be adequate to add them as de_DE, de_XX, ..
Therefore I would propose to remove "orange" tags from the utility - such name will be either "italic" or "orange" and never "normal". Both carry notion of something being wrong with the name.
This is a long-going discussion. In my eyes, duplication of data is *always* a bad thing, just as having different rules for similar things (see discussion on the list for that point).
having the value of the name-Tag duplicated in a name:xx-tag is, in my eyes not a bad thing, bus it is also unnecessary. So removing them is ok, even if it is not specially recommended.
If the case changed (e.g. the default name get's changed) it's up to an external tool / the user, to clean this up (this is easy with the mentioned tool).
I actually wonder if the default tag is the right thing to have altogether. Probably better might be to use some fallback order (say, "en,de,ru" to be very European-centric) and displaying the name in italic in OSM (meaning "fallback language applied").
I don't think this should/could be applied to a world-wide system.
Some more intelligent fallback mechanism could be applied in the future (using user's browser preferences for example):
You're talking about the maps now, right? Not about the tool, are you?
- Browser says "Accept-Language: zh;q=1.0, ja;q=0.2, en;q=0.1" - this
means "I understand Chinese (say Mandarin) and a bit of Japanese and some tiny English". For more details on that see RFC2616[2].
- The webserver sees that there is no "name:zh" but there are "name:en"
and "name:ja". This user indicates it prefers Japanese to English. Actually in this case Japanese is much better option for the users since there are chances that the kanji spelling will be the same as Chinese, like, for example, 中国 (same in the Japan language and simplified notation of Chinese).
But this would require on-demand application of the negotiated labels on the map and this technically might not be easy to be done in a feasible name (it would be difficult to create pre-generated tiles for different sets of user preferences).
We could have a map, deciding which language to display by the Accept-Language-header. But this decision would then be for the whole map as one.
Peter