There is something to be said about building tools out of kindness and not for greed. Thank you for your contributions to OSM and Thank you OSM developers too - big fan and user!
I work in public service and I've grotten so many people on board that the map in my region is pretty darned good.
Very satisfying and feels like you're doing something actually useful. Also nudges you to visit parts of your neighborhood you might never have been to before.
I used OpenStreetMaps to create a map with a theme that fits the website theme. There were no other free options that I could find to accomplish this goal. Moreover, the map works on just about every browser under the sun. Great work by their team.
Your attribution is hidden by default and it looks like you are doing it on purpose by running `attrib.classList.remove( 'maplibregl-compact-show' );`.
e.g. There's a bicycle parking next to the parkside exit at Ueno station, "上野駅公園口自転車駐車場". This is:
meaning: Ueno station park entrance bicycle parking ground in English,
read IRL: ue no eki kouen guchi jitensha chusha jou in Japanese, but written
on the map: shang ye yi gong yuan kou zi zhuan che zhu che chang as Chinese(in Pinyin but I don't know how to type it).
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:
https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/3395310504
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?).
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.
Open Street Map tends to reserve the “name” tag for what things are commonly called by the local community. It appears that for the Lake Ontario and The Gulf of Mexico they’ve added an “official_name:US” tag to capture the names in the executive orders.
Interesting that he changed the name to that of the entire continent, so Mexicans and Venezuelans can feel part of it.
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:official_name:en-US
"Few if any renderers consume official_name=* or any of its subkeys; in practice, the purpose of this key is for geocoders to find the feature when a user searches for the official name."
Though generally official names are the names nobody uses. For example the country labeled "France" also has the attribute "official_name:en": "French Republic"
If they ask what the rules of the game are, they've just lost again.
They didn't invent being deliberately obtuse.
Now, I'd love for each geographical region to take their very worst area, and rename it after a certain politician for the lulz.
Doesn't seem to be very clever to me.