Over the past several years certain mappers have repeatedly removed the name tag from the Atlantic Ocean node (History Viewer, Deep History). The same pattern can be seen for the North Atlantic and South Atlantic. Proponents of name removal argue that these oceans have no local name because nobody lives there. Regardless of whether this argument has merit, this has a negative downstream effect on OSM based maps.
For example, the comprehensive name:lang tags on ocean nodes allows the OSM Americana map to label them in many different languages. However, as you can see, the Atlantic Ocean is not labelled in any language. This doesn’t seem right since the node is tagged with many language specific name:lang tags. So why is the label missing? Because the node lacks a plain name tag and is tagged with noname=yes OpenMapTiles (the vector tile schema OSM Americana uses) sees it as a nameless feature and not something that should be included in the name layer. So it filters it out. Could the logic be more complicated and check for every possible name:lang tag before deciding the feature is nameless? Sure. But expecting a named feature to have a name tag seems like a reasonable expectation for a data consumer to make.
So do plain name tags belong on oceans? Should name be restored on these nodes? If not, then name should be removed from all the other oceans as well for consistency. At the very least it seems to me that noname=yes should be removed since it’s simply incorrect to assert that the Atlantic Ocean has no name. It clearly has many.
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Ce sujet de discussion accompagne la publication sur https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/atlantic-ocean-repeated-name-removal/101196