OpenStreetMap
A Comment from BlueTiger on 3 July 2014 at 14:14 in another entry; “ Most of the times when I travel I will leave the OSMTracker running and update new POIs. At times I have skipped uploading POIs as they don’t have proper tags in OSM. Unfortunately I have taken a bad choice here, I should have updated them anyway and requested for new tags.”
I’ve seen a few tags that were not “proper” in an OSM sense .. but they make sense if you know what is there. Unfortunately getting somethings in to be “proper” in OSM looks to me to be difficult due to the numbers and location game e.g. Radio Telescope. While other things that are not consistent get through - e.g. highway=footpath and highway=path. So I’m inclined to tag all things I consider important in either a navigational sense or a facility. Make a tag note= with some explanation if necessary. This way the data is there .. even if used at this time. I’d rather have the data recorded rather than thrown away. The “improper” tag can be changed latter if a more appropriate tag is available.
Discussion
Comment from malenki on 6 July 2014 at 11:12
+1
As I wasn’t as experienced as I am now I also did not map everything I found after a frustrating fruitless search for appropriate tags in the OSM wiki.
Nowadays if I don’t find a matching tag I pick the best matching english word for a value since the key mostly obvious, maybe add a note and also add it to a private collection of more or less undocumented tags
And even if the tag isn’t approved “officially” other people can find and use or comment it.
Comment from AndiG88 on 6 July 2014 at 13:29
This can’t be emphasized enough!
Especially if you are not a native English speaker make a note in your language. There are so many tags that are used and even defined incorrectly due to translation errors. Sometimes it is easy to figure out what was meant or at least what wasn’t - like a fireplace on a picnic site, but if vending=photo is a photo booth or some kind of printer is not always that obvious. Also adding any kind of additional tags helps. For example I was able to identity a lot of vending=photo as amenity=photo_booth by the operator tag.
And that has resulted in a lot of wrong tags coming mostly from the Germany community… Maybe you are more carefull when finding the best matching word by checking mutiple dictionaries, wikipedia, making a image search etc. but unfortunately a lot of people aren’t.
What Germans think a fireplace is:
What a fireplace actually is:
PLEASE create a tag page. And if you just take the template and fill out key/value. Then just copy the reasoning from your table. Then people will actually be able to find how you used it, because 99% won’t find that page you linked. Also to some extent we can then assume others used it in a similar way. In addition if someone finds the page that person is more likely to expand it, compared to a non existing one.
I know documenting tags in the Wiki is boring, but the time you all take now might save someone in the future a lot of work when he has to figure out how a tag was used. Also create actual tag pages and don’t just define it on a page related to the tag, unless it is very specific (fireplace= for example is correctly defined on wilderness hut page, but not on the picnic site page - if a page existed, maybe with an image, that misunderstanding would have been obvious much sooner)
Comment from DougPeterson on 30 January 2015 at 15:44
I know I have been guilty of this, particularly to make things render “properly” in off-line maps on my phone. I had not understood differences in renderers and issues with individual ones. In general, my issues were due to ordering of elements to render within the theme, which was noted in Mapsforge documentation I had not read. The solution was then to change the order in the theme and then go back and remove those “tags for the renderer”.
As I type this I realize I have one more type to go look for. I had tagged some buildings as layer=2. This was because some roofs I extended over roads were having the road rendered on top of the roof. Layer=1 did not seem to solve it so I put it as layer=2. Nonetheless, this is still tagging for the renderer and I should fix it.