It's a dumb thing to do too. If you have a website, you control what it says. For a shop or restaurant it's totally fine to just show a nice photo with your name, opening hours, address, and contact details, and just link to whatever social media accounts and reservation/delivery ordering platform you use.
It's also the place that will allow you to inform your patrons when big tech deletes your heavily invested in social media account for some reason.
Not having a normal website means that potential customers who search for you get hit by login-walls for Instagram and Facebook if they're not on it, or 'you need an app for this' with crap like TikTok. It also makes my (volunteer) job of mapping the area around me harder, because I'm most certainly not going to bother to enter any additional info about your business if I have to go to Instagram or Facebook (and in the OpenStreetMap community I'm not alone in that).
My experience is most restaurant websites are either outdated, offline, or hacked and showing some malware page. While the social media page is up to date.
While all of then problems you list are real, small restaurant owners don’t have the time or skills to run a website, having a social media and listing on the maps apps is enough.
I agree. If a business decided to only be on Facebook or Instagram, then they're choosing the path of hiding themselves from the open web. I wouldn't even bother to update their info on OSM.
A lot of people today, particularly young people, no longer use the open web in a browser. They only use the social-media walled gardens through phone apps. Even for some newspapers etc. that might have existed first as websites, they use instead the official phone apps. So, a restaurant making its own website is not as important in 2026 as you think.
I think it's a very sad state of affairs, but I find even myself trusting the Facebook page more than the actual website for many places, since you can see the latest updates on Facebook (and how recent they are), while the website could be completely outdated with no way to tell it.
Edit: ah, there it is. This site is so crappy loading this weird code that fucks up the clipboard takes a minute. You can tell it is loaded when the text selection colour changes to light blue instead of whatever you normally have.
This is better explained elsewhere in this thread, but it boils down to a totally valid trademark dispute over a company calling itself Automatic.css which supplies services for WordPress installs.
This rings true to me. I am looking at setting up my own online store, and if you sell (legal!) stuff which Shopify Payments disallows, but Stripe does allow, you end up looking at WooCommerce (a very popular WordPress plugin) pretty fast.
Either your phrasing is really odd, or you are sincerely promoting China's Uyghur 'reeducation' camps as being sensible for the greater good.
Europe meanwhile, in case you are unaware, is all about unity through culture, but the EU does this by celebrating its diversity (as well as actively protecting minority languages), not by Gleichschaltung.
How well is Europe’s unity through culture playing out when you’re trying to bridge Norway and Somalia, rather than Portugal and Spain or Denmark and the Netherlands?
Hell, looking back a decade or two, the PIIGs would’ve been a bit at odds with the other countries purely over debt.
Does the EU really repressing a best case for the common citizen in terms of unity and aligned society?
It's amusing you're downvoted when EU clearly has Hungary which is a failed experiment at transforming Hungary (well at least up until last election). You could say the same about Turkey. Both way further ahead of Somalia.
What kind of book cataloguing software (excluding something like an order system for a printer of present day books) demands an ISBN? The article smells due to its complete omission of any verifiable software or marketplace that does this.
> Somewhere around 11 PM on a Tuesday — it's always a Tuesday — you will attempt to catalog a book printed in Lyon in 1642 and the software will ask for an ISBN. Not politely. Insistently. A red border. A validation error. A small, pixel-perfect indignity.
What kind of crappy software are you using? It would exclude pretty much every serious archive (and quite a lot of home libraries too).
> The problem is the assumption, baked so deeply into most software that it's become invisible, that the ISBN is the identifier […]
Which software makes this assumption? I can register any book I like in Zotero.
> Try selling on a marketplace that requires an ISBN for listing.
Which marketplaces? ABEBooks lists rare antique first editions without any ISBN (which no antique item can have if we assume antique means a century old at least) without issue.
Name and shame them. This article now feels like it describes a real problem, but offers no concrete examples, which makes it feel like a rant aimed at a non-existent problem.
The naming policy is generally quite sensible, although individual mappers sometimes do weird things (OpenStreetMap is sort of an anarchistic collective). As long as most English speaking people around Lake Ontario and the Gulf of Mexico use those names, the `name` and `name:en` tags will reflect that. Usually the way media like quality newspapers use such a name is a good bellwether, and the normal name stays as long as it is evidently in common use.
If in the future most Americans do end up saying 'Lake America', `name` could follow that too, and Lake Ontario would end up in `alt_name`.
Or perhaps Americans from the White House to the New York Times to the school curriculum will call it Lake America, but Canadians will stick with Lake Ontario. In that case the top-level local language `name` might end up as 'Lake America/Ontario' (combining all local languages and variants) and `name:en` (English in general, so America would be a minority there) and `name:en-CA` would say Lake Ontario, and `name:en-US` would say Lake America. Time will tell. OpenStreetMap adjusts accordingly.
For the official name there is simply a different tag (`official_name`, or in this case `official_name:en-US` because the lake borders more than one country). Having that available makes it possible to search for it by that name.
I have a hard time making sense of your post. What do you mean with 'Japanese OSM maps'? There is just one OpenStreetMap, which includes Japan.
On OpenStreetMap all entities which are named have at the very least the tag `name`. There is no need to specify which language that name is in, because this is geographically determined. For the whole of Japan, `name`-tags are considered to be in Japanese.
This specific bicycle parking has no other names but that one `name` tag, which is the Japanese 上野駅公園口自転車駐車場:
This is totally normal. Most named entities only have a local name. A random bicycle parking is not likely to have a name in any other language but the local one. For things which actually have an exonym (like countries and larger cities), you will find additional namespaced language tags like `name:ja` and `name:en`, but a bicycle parking in Japan usually doesn't have an English name (although you can translate the Japanese name).
As for why you are seeing Chinese, that has nothing to do with OpenStreetMap. Some other tool in your chain is doing that (mkgmap?).
Yes, apparently it's a known unresolved issue with mkgmap tool. Looks like there is actually the option but not autodetected/not applicable if the entire planet is converted at once?
The nonsensical reading I posted in the parent comment was what I actually saw in a free map app that uses OSM data. That conversion tool is apparently used for few apps, and it apparently generate English pronunciations whenever "en" resources are missing and bake it into offline map tile files, but uses some Chinese transcription engine for all Kanji/Hanzi names.
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So, I assume this can be solved two ways: someone can define polygons for national borders, at least for all countries that could experience this problem, such as Japan, China, Korea, Vietnam, etc., and use appropriate transcription engines to generate English readings, either at the OSM side or at the conversion tool side. But that's going to define borders for nations, and therefore I assume that there will be some challenges along that borders since everyone have some territorial disputes.
I don't think this has nothing to do with OpenStreetMap; OSM could have tentative autogenerated name or something for location names that could use English transliteration, as one way this problem can be solved, aside whether it's OSM community responsibility to do so; it's extremely high quality community maintained free/libre map, which is already tremendous. Or it could be done at export tool side, following perhaps more natural division of responsibilities. But regardless, as a non-critical longstanding issue, and a matter of fact, there are actually such exported map files out there with Chinese pronunciations baked in.
It's also the place that will allow you to inform your patrons when big tech deletes your heavily invested in social media account for some reason.
Not having a normal website means that potential customers who search for you get hit by login-walls for Instagram and Facebook if they're not on it, or 'you need an app for this' with crap like TikTok. It also makes my (volunteer) job of mapping the area around me harder, because I'm most certainly not going to bother to enter any additional info about your business if I have to go to Instagram or Facebook (and in the OpenStreetMap community I'm not alone in that).
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