Talk:Key:official name

I've been using official_name for roads when the naming authority has publications which names a road different from what the street sign says, as a way to capture both the signed and published names. Blackboxlogic (talk) 15:36, 23 February 2024 (UTC)

Most of the time you should respect what the official GIS/road centerline says and put them as name instead official_name, if you spot any difference, you need to contact the GIS office. --CBRS (talk) 15:58, 7 October 2024 (UTC)

Except its good practice to map what's on the ground, either way it's a good idea to contact both the dataset owner and the people who maintain the road signs, sometimes one or the other is wrong and they might fix it. Aharvey (talk) 04:31, 30 January 2025 (UTC)

Applying same name= and official_name=

Similar to how we sometimes set name=* and name:en=* to the same value indicating that name=* is in English, could we also set both name=* and official_name=* to the same value to indicate it is both the common/signposted name and also it's officially assigned. Aharvey (talk) 20:08, 27 January 2025 (UTC)

I'm in favor of putting the name in [official_name] only if it differs from [name]. If both names are the same, then the [official_name] tag won't be needed. If we were to do as you say, then a billion city names in the world would have the same values in the [name] and [official_name] keys which is pointless. E.g. name=London + official_name=London. maro21 23:12, 12 February 2025 (UTC)

My motive is to distinguish officially assigned names from informal names. For example a government geographic names register may list one place=neighbourhood with official name X, but we might also have another place=neighbourhood which is known by name Y, but it's not officially part of the government geographic names register. Both would be tagged name=* without official_name=* hence we can't distinguish between the two. However thinking about it, we do have other options, for example name:ref=* (possibly with a key suffix) may be used to assign the official names register number and therefore can be used to distinguish them. Aharvey (talk) 23:25, 12 February 2025 (UTC)