Hello guys, please don’t start this before any general consensus is reached. And please don’t try to do this manually. This is a natural thing for bots to do. Doing it manually will take months and will result in a huge tagging chaos, it’s a waste of time. A bot can change names quicker and more consistently than any human ever could.

There are certain reasons why Russian was chosen over Belarusian by the Belarusian OSM community. Most notably because Russian is also an official language in the country, and because it is much more widely used than Belarusian. You can verify this by using Wikipedia usage stats, less than 2.3% of Belarusian Wikipedia traffic goes to Belarusian-language Wikipedia, almost 88% goes to the Russian-language one. Language preferences for average OSM users might be similar. However, I am not arguing for or against the usage of either language on OSM.

But please join the discussion at https://forum.openstreetmap.org/viewtopic.php?id=57084 , because changing a country’s main mapping language is something that should be discussed with all of its mapping community, not just on a blog post.

And again, if the decision to use Belarusian will be made, this should be done by bots to get a consistent naming pattern.

Я постепенно меняется это неточное сопоставление. :)