Forum:Global and regional issues/Reuse and duplication of placenames

Forums → Global and regional issues → Global and regional issues/Reuse and duplication of placenames

Hello, everyone.

I want to open the discussion about the reuse of placenames and other toponyms on OGF. Many places in the world that were colonized by European powers often had people that reused the names of cities, rivers, mountains, or other cultural elements in the "new world." For example, London, Ontario is on the Thames River, and there are nearly dozens of places in Missouri that reuse placenames. This is a common feature throughout especially North America but elsewhere, too.

So, what I would like to know is who would be willing to allow placenames and toponyms to be shared to help with the naming of features in the FSA and potentially other places. The proposed guidelines are suggested below to help protect your creative work. Please let me know in the discussion area below what you'd be willing to share with the community. — Alessa _(talk) 16:04, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

Proposed guidelines for reusing toponyms

Here are the proposed guidelines for reusing toponyms elsewhere on OGF:

• Mappers should add name:etymology=* to the node, way, or relation that marks the reused name. In that way, the original creator is credited. Streets and highways would be exempt, but settlements and geographic features would not be. For example, a node in New Carnaby labeled place=town and name=Lynchester would also add name:etymology=Lynchester, Ingerland. By doing this, we could potentially use Overpass to create a running list on the wiki of these placenames.
• Names from any open purple or blue territory are free to use, as they are community territories. Mappers should still credit the etymology.
• Unoriginal toponyms that are generic terms (e.g. Springfield or Riverside in English) do not require the etymology, as they are largely generic and easily reusable in a variety of situations.
• If a territory is abandoned, its contents may be reused as above until a new owner takes over and makes a determination of its status.

Discussion

Please let me know your thoughts and if you'd be willing to let me and others reuse some of the names from your territory! — Alessa _(talk) 16:04, 27 March 2023 (UTC)

I like this idea a lot. I would only say that I would be pleased to see this proposed name:etymology tag's use broadened to include linguistic information. I currently have been using my own, self-invented tag "ldata:etymology" quite extensively in my mapping to show the "meanings" of most of the native names I use. I had set up "ldata:" (= "luciano's data") as a kind of parent tag for anything that was non-standard (i.e. not in OSM). So for example, Ohunkagan's relation includes ldata:etymology=Rakhoda "myth or legend"I would happily convert those to something that the community agreed on as standard. I have also made use of "old world" names extensively in Makaska. Just as a single example, here is the village of New Orlent, named after Orlent in Kalm: https://opengeofiction.net/#map=16/-42.9857/145.5836&layers=B. If understand the proposal correctly, I'd want to add a tag name:etymology=Orlent, Kalm.--Luciano (talk) 18:11, 27 March 2023 (UTC)