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I had been editing some street names in the medina of Essaouira, putting the arabic name of the streets in the 'name' tag, according to what I read in http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Multilingual_names#Morocco unfortunately, quite a few mappers after me have put the arabic name in the 'name:ar' tag, or even simply overwritten it using the french name. I understand that this is a "mistake", but since there's so many people making it, I suppose there's some logic or need behind the "mistake" that is not acknowledged by the current rule. writing in arabic is not easy with portable mapping hardware, reading arabic on maps is also not immediate for western users. any hints?
This question is marked "community wiki".
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The only "hints" I can see is "education" and "taskforce". French is not an official language in Moroco although it is very present for historical reasons. Contact the people changing the "name" tag and explain them that the official name is the arabic version and the French version, even though it can be on signs, has to go to the "name:fr" tag. You should also change the current wrong tagging around the country as much and quick as possible. Mappers, especially armchair mappers (remote), tend to reproduce the practices they see locally. Important is to do this not alone but to build a group of local contributors, a "taskforce" to fix the wrong "name" tags in a larger scale (it's also a way to find a local consensus). If you are more local contributors imposing the local rules, then remote mappers will stop by themselves to import their local usage to your country. 2
But you shouldn't start an edit war. Try to contact the local mappers first and explain the issue before fixing their edits.
(29 Aug '13, 13:43)
scai ♦
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... and part of the "education" might be pointing the mappers concerned at maps that render maps in specific languages (there are a bunch of help questions here covering that, with links to example maps).
(29 Aug '13, 14:05)
SomeoneElse ♦
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I spent some time in Tunisia recently. I now understand why names were shown in Arabic on my map even though I had chosen "English" or "French"!