I was preparing a video tutorial about stiles (online tomorrow morning on my channel). Even though I have mapped quite a few stiles while hiking, I came to the realization that I had mapped a lot of them wrong (mostly using OSMAnd, where I have to remember a lot of tags, bc they’re not presets) after reading the wiki page barrier=stile. Oops. While reading the page, it occurred to me that it was a bit messy, so I tried to tidy it up a bit and tried to find some examples for such cases that are a bit tricky to decide, like the stepover. I had tagged some of those as ladder, because they included more than one step.

I also took a look at the taginfo for the stile values, and boy, was there chaos! I mean, we’re mostly all humans, so we make mistakes and typos which might then be propagated through auto-text in JOSM or copying and pasting, who knows. I actually found one mistake I made myself this way. Some were obvious typos (steover) that I could correct without having visited the site, for others, I contacted the person who had added them (sometimes as far back as 8 years ago, so they couldn’t remember, and just had to delete the stile=* line, unfortunately).

But I also looked at commonly used ones like hipster and added explanations to the wiki page. Two I had to translate into English, and I hope I did it correctly, because they were both in languages I don’t speak, so I used image search to figure out what could be meant. I reduced the list from 4 pages of values to 2.5, so it’s a bit tidier now.

I also saw a strange squeezer stile on Twitter (coincidentally) and asked the person to upload the photograph to Wikicommons.

I noticed three undocumented values that I think describe the same situation and started a discussion on the Discussion page. Please have a look.

I recommend getting mapillary or similar from hiking trails, if you can, because it would help with mapping stiles. I know it’s a bit awkward, but it is possible to hold a selfie-stick with a phone to capture images, even if you walk for hours. Or use an action camera - I have yet to try that.