Talk:Tag:sport=shot-put

British English value is shot-put

According the the 'Oxford English Dictionary' the correct name is shot-put, the dash being preferred by the British. Americans drop the dash and use a space instead. It is a minor point but as OSM has a policy of using British English this name should be used. Warin61 (talk) 02:44, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

Hi, Warin61! I just posted a comment on a recent edit of yours regarding this spelling. Traditionally programmatically inspired tags (i.e. just identifiers) tend to replace - with _ and thus "shot put" and "shot-put" both translate to shot_put for tags. The value of the tag is only used as an identifier and while we should use British English for consistency, the "-" should still become a "_", at least in my opinion :) -- MMN-o (talk) 08:32, 11 April 2016 (UTC)

A 'tradition'? Well OSM does not conform! From the 'taginfo' report page on 'characters in keys' says Any valid Unicode character can appear in an OSM key but usually only lower case latin letters (a-z) and the underscore (_) are used. The colon (:) is often used as a separator character. An example of 'dash' use in OSM is opening_hours=Mo-Su 08:00-23:00 Warin61 (talk) 21:34, 12 April 2016 (UTC)

You're absolutely right about what's allowed and not. But as it says, "a to z and _" are used when normalising. The reason is that when a dash is used, like in opening_hours, it has a special meaning. It means "the range of Mo-Su" (and 08-23), while for example "shot-put" would not make sense to interpret that way.

Because the dash often has special value in tags, and even in the programming languages we use to interpret them with, I would say that a single word/phrase should always be normalised to the recommended "a to z and _" characters, i.e. use shot_put even if you'd write "shot-put" in a sentence otherwise.

Is it ok if I edit the wiki page to reflect this or should we get someone else's opinion on this? MMN-o (talk) 08:48, 13 April 2016 (UTC)

as it says is for keys, and it is a preference not normalisation. I repeat Any valid Unicode character can appear in an OSM key so the use of a 'dash' is fine and is used within OSM in 'values'. The 'value' and 'keys' used are not part of a programming language - thus they don't have to conform to the various restraints of a particular programming language .. indeed the different languages have different constraints .. tying OSM up into knots to conform to all of them is not required. I did raise the spelling issue on the tagging group, only one other participant there too. The 'dash' is used to combine the two words 'shot' and 'put' so it is a 'special meaning', not the same use as a space. For opening_hours use of the dash maybe taken as meaning 'to'. I changed some 10% of the existing shot_put tags to see if there would be any reaction, again yours is the only one.. my thanks. Please keep going! If I cannot convince you of the validity of the use of the dash .. well I don't think that would be good. I'll consider raising it again in the tagging group. https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2016-April/029080.html and https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2016-April/029091.html There is no rush at present, and documenting this here shows others our thinking. Warin61 (talk) 01:51, 14 April 2016 (UTC)