An Attempt at Fixing Name Tags in the Republic of Srpska
Posted by michalfabik on 21 March 2021 in English.The Proposal
In late 2020, I drafted a proposal to introduce a common format for the name=*
tag in the Republic of Srpska, a territorial subdivision of Bosnia and Herzegovina (BiH). The reasons were mainly general data inconsistency and recurring edit wars. There are two official scripts in the Republika Srpska, Latin and Cyrillic, both of which are in active use. Moreover, some mappers (as well as members of the general public) consider the usage of either or both of the two scripts a political tool and/or an instrument of nationalist propaganda. This means that it is hard to reach a consensus as to what the name=*
format should be. It can be argued that a tag like name=Бања Лука
is violating the On-the-Ground Rule because both scripts - not just Cyrillic - are official. It can also be argued that a tag such as name=Banja Luka / Бања Лука
violates the OTG Rule because the city is not called “Banja Luka Slash Banja Luka” or because one of the scripts is “more official” than the other and should therefore be listed first. Therefore, I included several possible name formats in my proposal and invited the members of the OSM community in BiH to vote for the most suitable one with the intention to propose the winning format “officially” to the worldwide OSM community. The voting took place on the proposal’s discussion page.
The Response
I have contacted 55 mappers in total, most of whom were my saved private message contacts with whom I have corresponded over more than 4 years of consistently reaching out to BiH users, others were top-ranking mappers recently active in the country. As you can see on the proposal discussion/voting page linked above, the response was rather underwhelming, with many of the most active users ignoring the communication and the vote completely.