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Wiki updating consensus 1: city names

Post by davidg666
[I plan to update some parts of the Ireland section of the wiki in the near future - but before I do that, I hope to discuss the changes first in case there's any disagreement, since some of the changes I propose haven't been covered before and I think different editors amongst have different ways of doing things]

First: naming cities, towns, villages and city suburbs:
  1. In general, only assign a city name to road segments that are inside a city/town/village. Rural roads that are outside a city/town/village should have “None” checked, even if they are near (but not in) a city/town/village.
  • For large cities, divide into suburbs and give only the suburb name to streets in each suburb. Don’t make the city name part of the suburb name - so have (for example) “Clontarf”, not “Clontarf (Dublin)”
  • Give a couple of streets in the exact centre of a city that has named suburbs the same name as that city so that city itself can be navigated to.
  • Where more than one city/town/village exists with the same name, give the unadorned name to the larger one, and append the county name in brackets to the smaller one. For example: “Dungarvan” and “Dungarvan (Kilkenny)”.
  • Only assign a city name to road segments within an actual city/town/village/suburb - rural roads should have “None” checked for the city name and not the townland name.
  • When deciding if a small settlement is big enough to have a name, see if it’s got its own post office or if there are name signs on its approach roads. Use the name seen on these signs as the settlement name, and use the location of the sign as the edge of the named area.
Let the discussion begin...

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Post by bprob
davidg666 wrote:[I plan to update some parts of the Ireland section of the wiki in the near future - but before I do that, I hope to discuss the changes first in case there's any disagreement, since some of the changes I propose haven't been covered before and I think different editors amongst have different ways of doing things]

First: naming cities, towns, villages and city suburbs:
Great idea! Thanks for setting these threads up David
My 2 cents:
In general, only assign a city name to road segments that are inside a city/town/village. Rural roads that are outside a city/town/village should have “None” checked, even if they are near (but not in) a city/town/village.
Agree
For large cities, divide into suburbs and give only the suburb name to streets in each suburb. Don’t make the city name part of the suburb name - so have (for example) “Clontarf”, not “Clontarf (Dublin)”
Agree, with exception you mentioned below of duplicate placenames like Blackrock in Cork and Dublin or Monkstown in Cork and Dublin. (e.g. Blackrock (Cork), as is currently the case)
Give a couple of streets in the exact centre of a city that has named suburbs the same name as that city so that city itself can be navigated to.
Agree, though the definition of a few will vary probably from city to city. (Again a Cork example as it is area I'm most familiar with: All of central island is labelled as "Cork" along with some nearby areas which aren't named in suburbs. In total this is quite a large area)
Where more than one city/town/village exists with the same name, give the unadorned name to the larger one, and append the county name in brackets to the smaller one. For example: “Dungarvan” and “Dungarvan (Kilkenny)”.
Agree
Only assign a city name to road segments within an actual city/town/village/suburb - rural roads should have “None” checked for the city name and not the townland name.
Agree in general, though I would also label a bypass road as being part of a city, even though it would not have buildings on it: i will elaborate a bit on this in the road names thread
  • When deciding if a small settlement is big enough to have a name, see if it’s got its own post office or if there are name signs on its approach roads. Use the name seen on these signs as the settlement name, and use the location of the sign as the edge of the named area.
Agree in principle, but there may be historical groupings of places where the post office or other official buildings have been closed in recent years. This will likely be a more rural issue. I know of three or 4 areas which are basically collections of townlands but there is no village per se: they were grouped as an entity, often centred on a particular crossroads. Kildinan in north east Cork is one such example, though I expect such situations are quite rare, maybe they should still be accommodated?

Great threads, hope discussion is lively!
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Post by bprob
davidg666 wrote: I hope we get county support from Waze soon (although I wouldn't hold my breath!) so that we don't have to clutter the map with too many extended/bracketed names - especially when some places have similar sizes and the first one on the map gets the unadorned name.
True, will be waiting a long time though i'd say!
I think the definition of "a few" doesn't matter too much, so long as they're in the centre of the city in question; I notice Waze seems to navigate you to what looks like the geographical centre of a city if you just give it the city name as a destination.

In Dublin we just have one or two small streets that are off O'Connell St with "Dublin" for the city, although most of the rest of the inner city is marked as "Dublin 1" and "Dublin 2" for want of a better name. I don't think this looks particularly good, but I suppose it's still the best choice.
I think llayden put a single segment of locked street under the landmark of GPO named just "Dublin" but I don't think that worked. I tried the same thing with the main post office in Cork, without success
I agree that the post office itself shouldn't determine the presence (or otherwise) of a settlement (although if it is there, then it's a handy indicator), which is why I suggested the name signs on the approach. From what I've observed around Kilkenny/Wexford most places that I thought were worth labelling had name signs.

I guess that, since we use townland names as road names for small rural roads, those would suffice for navigation in these areas - Waze seems happy to route to a road named after a townland, which is handy. It must not use Bing for finding locations here, like it does in other countries.

Anyway: for these situations where there is a small settlement that doesn't have either a post office or name signs, then I think we could leave it up to the discretion of the editor: if they feel that it's a settlement worth marking, then they can do so, otherwise it can be left out. One thing that I'd like to avoid is giving long stretches of rural road a city name, because this then shades the map on the client (and in the editor, if the city layer is turned on) and gives the impression that there's an urban area there when there isn't - and when it's done frequently it makes the map look quite cluttered.
Ya. The Post Office is a relevant indictor and will be the main indicator in a lot of cases. You're right that most relevant places will have street signs.
The local editor will know best in the end.
Only issue with townlands of course is that there is even more duplication there than there is with village names, but at least there is no exclusivity on their use. (so many developers in last few years were really unimaginative when it came to naming new estates: there are loads named after trees! So the duplication problem won't just be limited to town lands!)
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Post by davidg666
bprob wrote:
davidg666 wrote:For large cities, divide into suburbs and give only the suburb name to streets in each suburb. Don’t make the city name part of the suburb name - so have (for example) “Clontarf”, not “Clontarf (Dublin)”
Agree, with exception you mentioned below of duplicate placenames like Blackrock in Cork and Dublin or Monkstown in Cork and Dublin. (e.g. Blackrock (Cork), as is currently the case)
I hope we get county support from Waze soon (although I wouldn't hold my breath!) so that we don't have to clutter the map with too many extended/bracketed names - especially when some places have similar sizes and the first one on the map gets the unadorned name.
bprob wrote:
davidg666 wrote:Give a couple of streets in the exact centre of a city that has named suburbs the same name as that city so that city itself can be navigated to.
Agree, though the definition of a few will vary probably from city to city. (Again a Cork example as it is area I'm most familiar with: All of central island is labelled as "Cork" along with some nearby areas which aren't named in suburbs. In total this is quite a large area)
I think the definition of "a few" doesn't matter too much, so long as they're in the centre of the city in question; I notice Waze seems to navigate you to what looks like the geographical centre of a city if you just give it the city name as a destination.

In Dublin we just have one or two small streets that are off O'Connell St with "Dublin" for the city, although most of the rest of the inner city is marked as "Dublin 1" and "Dublin 2" for want of a better name. I don't think this looks particularly good, but I suppose it's still the best choice.
bprob wrote:
davidg666 wrote:Only assign a city name to road segments within an actual city/town/village/suburb - rural roads should have “None” checked for the city name and not the townland name.
Agree in general, though I would also label a bypass road as being part of a city, even though it would not have buildings on it: i will elaborate a bit on this in the road names thread
I've tended not to label bypass roads as part of a city/town, unless the bypass road has become more-or-less absorbed into the city/town. Anyway, I'll comment on your remark in the road names thread.
bprob wrote:
davidg666 wrote:When deciding if a small settlement is big enough to have a name, see if it’s got its own post office or if there are name signs on its approach roads. Use the name seen on these signs as the settlement name, and use the location of the sign as the edge of the named area.
Agree in principle, but there may be historical groupings of places where the post office or other official buildings have been closed in recent years. This will likely be a more rural issue. I know of three or 4 areas which are basically collections of townlands but there is no village per se: they were grouped as an entity, often centred on a particular crossroads. Kildinan in north east Cork is one such example, though I expect such situations are quite rare, maybe they should still be accommodated?
I agree that the post office itself shouldn't determine the presence (or otherwise) of a settlement (although if it is there, then it's a handy indicator), which is why I suggested the name signs on the approach. From what I've observed around Kilkenny/Wexford most places that I thought were worth labelling had name signs.

I guess that, since we use townland names as road names for small rural roads, those would suffice for navigation in these areas - Waze seems happy to route to a road named after a townland, which is handy. It must not use Bing for finding locations here, like it does in other countries.

Anyway: for these situations where there is a small settlement that doesn't have either a post office or name signs, then I think we could leave it up to the discretion of the editor: if they feel that it's a settlement worth marking, then they can do so, otherwise it can be left out. One thing that I'd like to avoid is giving long stretches of rural road a city name, because this then shades the map on the client (and in the editor, if the city layer is turned on) and gives the impression that there's an urban area there when there isn't - and when it's done frequently it makes the map look quite cluttered.

Thanks for your remarks!

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Post by davidg666
Timbones wrote:(Apologies for invading your threads)
You're more than welcome to invade! I lurk on your forum all the time and occasionally stick my head up.

Actually, do you know anything about country-specific TTS behaviour? We'd really like to get Waze to stop pronouncing all our N-roads as North-roads. "turn left onto north four north" sounds wrong when it should be "turn left onto N4 north" and all the signs (and all your memory over the years) is of the N4.

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Post by davidg666
Timbones wrote:Not sure what the status of that problem is. There's a thread in the UK forum about it, but it's been quiet for a while.
I had a message from one of the South Africa editors (they also have N roads) who said the problem had been resolved a few weeks ago; he advised to try clearing my TTS cache and check again that the problem is still happening here. I've done that and will find out next time I drive the right way.
Timbones wrote:Which language are you using? English or UK English or ...?
Oh, UK English of course. I like my words spelled right :)

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Post by davidg666
xteejx wrote:FYI Orit declined English (IE). I complained ;-)
He was probably right to do so - the translation would be 99% the same ("exit" instead of "junction" is the only difference I can think of).

I am less aware of any country-specific TTS rules that are available. Some Irish placenames (as found in roads and so on) get pronounced well enough, but others get completely mangled.

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Post by davidg666
About TTS pronunciation for N roads, yesterday I said:
davidg666 wrote:I had a message from one of the South Africa editors (they also have N roads) who said the problem had been resolved a few weeks ago; he advised to try clearing my TTS cache and check again that the problem is still happening here. I've done that and will find out next time I drive the right way.
I tried clearing my TTS cache (navigate to "cc@tts" to do this) and N-road pronunciation works much better now - I've only done a couple of drives since, but most N-road cases are pronounced as "N" not "north", and most cases of 'N' by itself are still (correctly) pronounced as "north" - with just one exception I've found so far.

I had been experimenting with an on-ramp to the N4 over the last couple of weeks with putting single and double quotes around the N, but that didn't seem to help, and thankfully it doesn't seem to be necessary any more anyway.

Summary: try clearing your TTS caches and see what you think of the improved pronunciation of N-roads.

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Post by davidg666
bprob wrote:
davidg666 wrote:In Dublin we just have one or two small streets that are off O'Connell St with "Dublin" for the city, although most of the rest of the inner city is marked as "Dublin 1" and "Dublin 2" for want of a better name. I don't think this looks particularly good, but I suppose it's still the best choice.
I think llayden put a single segment of locked street under the landmark of GPO named just "Dublin" but I don't think that worked. I tried the same thing with the main post office in Cork, without success
True; I haven't tested myself to see whether navigating to just "Dublin" works. Maybe the segment in question needs to be actually attached to the road network, otherwise it wouldn't be considered to possible to navigate to it. More experimentation required...
bprob wrote:Only issue with townlands of course is that there is even more duplication there than there is with village names, but at least there is no exclusivity on their use. (so many developers in last few years were really unimaginative when it came to naming new estates: there are loads named after trees! So the duplication problem won't just be limited to town lands!)
Good point - and you're right about estate names! I must've come across dozens of estates (or parts of estates) called "The Elms", "The Ashes", "The Oaks", etc.

At least these kind of things should have a city/town name, so I'm not worried about those. You're right about duplicated townland names though, of course. I don't know of a clever solution other than to hope that the user is going to either look at the map around the destination or look at the list of navigation instructions before setting off, to make sure they're heading to the right part of the country. That's what I do anyway, but I'm sure there are some of users out there who'll just blindly follow whatever directions they're given and then wonder why they're in Sligo when they were trying to get to Kerry (apologies to anybody from Sligo :) )

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Post by floppyrod84
FYI Orit declined English (IE). I complained ;-)

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