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OSM Wiki KeyDescription or ValueDescription templates & Taginfo

Posted by MarcoR on 9 June 2022 in English. Last updated on 17 June 2022.

In the OSM wiki there are some templates (KeyDescription and ValueDescription) that are used by Taginfo to show some useful informations to the user; since the same information is contained in the Data Item linked to the feature page, some wiki users, in good faith, shorten these templates to their minimum (e.g. “{{KeyDescription}}”), thus preventing Taginfo from fetching the data.

This is what ref:mise on Taginfo currently looks like: taginfo-wiki-description.png

I think that this issue is on Taginfo side but, for the time being, it doesn’t seem to be on their To-do list; for this reason, I believe that we should preserve (or restore if removed) the information stored in these templates (even if this means maintaining the same information in two separate locations, i.e. the Wiki page and the Data Item page).

Here is a sorted list of the OSM Wiki pages (tags or key related) which contain the text “{{KeyDescription}}” or “{{TagDescription}}”:

Please don’t automatically edit the Wiki; I am just a normal Wiki user and OSM mapper :)

The above list has been extracted from the OSM wiki dump file, which I had previously filtered to extract only the last revision of every page, using xmlstarlet:

xmlstarlet sel -N "x=http://www.mediawiki.org/xml/export-0.11/" -t -m '//x:page/x:revision/x:text[contains(text(),"{{KeyDescription}}") or contains(text(),"{{ValueDescription}}")]' -v '../../x:title' -n last_revision_dump.xml

Watch out: huge xml files (34GB for all revisions and 893MB for only the last one) tend to easily and quickly fill up your RAM pretty easily when read with tools like xmlstarlet or Python

Cheers,

Marco.