Change the name of `Lawyer office`

[Dimitar5555]

Currently office=lawyer + lawyer=notary and office=notary have the same name (Notary office) which can cause confusion if the translator doesn't see the tags. Is it possible to change the preset name of office=lawyer to something else?

[tyrasd]

You mean that office=notary shares the same name and should be renamed, right?

The wiki is not very helpful on this matter, unfortunately:

Note that this tag may have different meaning (currently it is not defined) […]

Note that currently the preset for office=lawyer + lawyer=notary is a "hidden" one (not searchable), so it wouldn't cause confusion by being a duplicate in the search results. //edit: and I assume that these two presets sharing the same name might have been intentional.

What would you propose to call these two presets?

[Dimitar5555]

I meant office=notary. office=notary can be called Notary office and office=lawyer + lawyer=notary can be called Civil law notary (as they are called in the respective Wikipedia articles). I'm not sure if it would make sense when it's translated in other languages though.

[tyrasd]

I found some older tickets regarding this tag:

• https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/issues/4634
• https://github.com/openstreetmap/iD/pull/4491#commitcomment-25316574

and here's a recent usage statistics graph:

.

[tyrasd]

I'm not really familiar with the common law system, so the concept of different kinds of notaries was new for me and please correct me if I'm wrong. But after reading this topic up a bit on wikipedia, what I understand is that in some countries (the using the common law system, i.e., UK, Ireland, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and perhaps a few others) there exist two different kinds of notaries: notaries public and civil law notaries. In other countries (e.g., continental Europe) this distinction does not seem to exist (anymore).

Having this in mind, I think the decision to hide the preset for lawyer=notary seems like it was a mistake.

Now, the question is: wouldn't it be best if we limit the office=notary preset to countries with common law systems and call it Notary Public?

[1ec5]

Now, the question is: wouldn't it be best if we limit the office=notary preset to countries with common law systems and call it Notary Public?

Yes, I think a regionally limited preset for notaries public makes plenty of sense, as long as we can reliably identify the jurisdictions where they operate. It’s possible that some of the earlier confusion was because civil law notaries are unheard of in most of the United States. But adding to the confusion, civil law notaries apparently do operate in parts of the U.S., including Louisiana (which uses civil law) and Florida (which uses common law). So we would need to keep the civil law notary preset enabled for these hybrid jurisdictions as well.

The capability to define regional presets changes the calculus for a lot of old discussions like the ones you dug up. For one thing, Bail Bond Agent could also be limited to certain legal systems, although that probably isn’t causing any problems because “bail bond agent” doesn’t mean a different thing in other legal systems.