Meaningful and disambiguating class/type labels

[dittaeva]

Many of the class/type labels do not make sense for the user unless they are well familiar with the OSM map features tagging scheme. I have gone through the list and changed the most obvious ones that do not make sense on their own, or need disambiguating from other labels. Have also made some other adjustments.

Most are problematic because they aren't nouns. It does not make sense to have a name on "Residential" or "Conservation", and "Construction" on its own sounds more like a building than an area.

I've left out the following problematic labels:
amenity:bureau_de_change You could probably write English with only French words, but it doesn't make it understandable. Let the French translation use French.
amenity:hall what is this, a building?
amenity:preschool On the wiki, this is said to be equal to kindergarten.
historic:* The first historic items could probably benefit from a "Historic " prefix.
waterway:lock The same as lock gate?

[tomhughes]

I think you are a bit confused about Bureau-de-Change... Although that does indeed come from the French it is now part (like many foreign words and phrases) of standard english usage and is exactly what an english speaker would expect it to be called.

[dittaeva]

Thanks for the prompt and plentiful correction and feedback @tomhughes. I'm not at all confused about "Bureau-de-Change", as I thought would be understood from my quip about "You could probably write English with only French words". However, I still think we should use words and phrases that are easy to understand for as many as possible.

Thus "currency exchange" would probably be better.

[dittaeva]

My girlfriend who is a native English speaker suggested that we make an en-UK, en-US, en-SA, and so on versions, which would be one way to solve many of mine and Tom's differences.

[tomhughes]

I was going to say that part of the problem here seems to be that our "en" text has traditionally been, as far as I know, en-GB while I suspect you are more aiming at en-US here.

We need to decide what variant of "english" our "en" translations will be and then if people want to add alternatives for other variants they can do so via translatewiki.

[dittaeva]

I'm aiming for it to be more universally understandable, if it fits better with GB or US does not really concern me (and my girlfriend is not American;). I don't really think it is necessary to decide on a variant, but if it comes to it, then I suppose it isn't much of a problem either.

[joshdoe]

I would suggest en should strive to be understandable to as many English speakers as possible regardless of their country of origin. This is pretty much what we do with tags, though we tend to use en-GB terms unless another term is more widely understood, such as alcohol instead of off-license (as an en-US user, I had never heard that one before).

[dittaeva]

I've rolled back the contentious and faulty changes and changed "Pre-school" to "Kindergarten" as stated on the OSM wiki, since I didn't get any feedback to the contrary.

Please comment if anything stands in the way of pulling.

[gravitystorm]

Superseded by #3536