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harmonize spelling of titles with slashes

Open tyrasd opened this issue 2 years ago • 7 comments

I noticed that we had been using quite a mix of different spellings in titles which contain a slash. Sometimes they contain spaces between the words, sometimes now, e.g.: Entrance / Exit vs. Barbecue/Grill.

I've tried to follow the rules of the CMOS (when the slash is separating single words, use no spaces, otherwise add spaces. – see https://www.chicagomanualofstyle.org/qanda/data/faq/topics/Punctuation/faq0096.html), resulting in the following cases:

  • no spaces before and after the / between single word alternatives (e.g. Borough/Suburb)
  • spaces before and after the / where the slash is between alternatives where at least one is consisting of multiple words (e.g. Dojo / Martial Arts Academy)
  • no spaces before and after the / when a part of a multi-word term consist of a two single-worded alternatives (e.g. Preschool/Kindergarten Grounds)
  • spaces before and after the / when a part of a multi word term consists of at least one non single-worded alternative (e.g. Property Management / Leasing Office)[^1]

It would be nice if native speakers here could confirm that this approach indeed makes sense. :innocent: //cc @1ec5, @k-yle, @arch0345, et al.

[^1]: note that this case could potentially result in ambiguous cases (i.e. in the example above: does it mean Property Management-or-Leasing Office or Property Management Office-or-Leasing Office). But I think our current cases should be all clear enough. And if we really need to, we could always write it differently to avoid the ambiguity.

tyrasd avatar Apr 18 '23 16:04 tyrasd

:bento: Preview the tagging presets of this pull request here: https://pr-874--ideditor-presets-preview.netlify.app/id/dist/#locale=en.

github-actions[bot] avatar Apr 18 '23 16:04 github-actions[bot]

Pinging @zelonewolf as native speaker and willing to review this kind of stuff (let me know if not interested anymore)

matkoniecz avatar Apr 18 '23 17:04 matkoniecz

Huh, this is something I've never really thought about. I would tend to say there should be no spaces when it's a single-word alternative and with spaces when it's a phrase. But this is very minor.

ZeLonewolf avatar Apr 18 '23 17:04 ZeLonewolf

Personally, space-padded version seems slightly more readable to me - but I think I would survive decision in either direction.

If it is stuck for years and both versions are valid - maybe decide by coin flip? Or by poll on the community forums?

matkoniecz avatar Aug 01 '25 09:08 matkoniecz

I plan to make competing PR that will add space-padded labels (likely in more than 30 days)

matkoniecz avatar Oct 19 '25 10:10 matkoniecz

@FloEdelmann you made some rewrite tools, maybe you would be interested in making space-padded / PR version?

matkoniecz avatar Nov 23 '25 21:11 matkoniecz

Done: https://github.com/openstreetmap/id-tagging-schema/pull/1817

FloEdelmann avatar Nov 24 '25 10:11 FloEdelmann