[HOT] Buildings and residential areas: Buldings as nodes (Q1)

[Bjoern Hassler]

Dear all,
I've got a few questions about buildings and residential areas. Here's the
first one. Can buildings be entered as nodes? This may well have been
discussed before :) but I'd like to understand the situation better.

On the one hand, https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:building suggests
that nodes tagged as buildings are fine. However, nodes with  building=yes
only are not rendered in standard carto.

https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/?key=building says there's just
about 0.9m buildings as nodes (about 0.5% of buildings that are areas,
which is about 220m in total). Running some overpass queries, I'd say there
are around 60,000 buildings as nodes in sub-Saharan Africa (so about ~7% of
the total "buildings as nodes" set), and poking around a bit, some seem to
come from campaigns like these:

   - #hotosm-liberia-task-489
   - #hotosm-task-572
   - #hotosm-ebola-si-586, #MapGive #UNVolunteers

Do you have any suggestions? I guess the questions are:

   - Should nodes[building=yes][name=""] be rendered in carto?
   - If not, what about existing nodes? Should they be replaced by ways?
   - If yes, then would it not be easier to just use nodes in for some
   campaigns? It's obviously much faster just to copy-paste building nodes
   (e.g. in JOSM) rather than drawing outlines. I can see that outlines help
   in cities, as it indicates land-use better, but in many of the deep-rural
   areas, is there a strong benefit to having buildings as outlines? Sure, it
   tell us the size (which relates to quantity of spray), but is the exact
   size that relevant? Do we know that data is entered accurately enough for
   this to matter?

Anyway, not meant to be controversial - just trying to understand the issue!

I've also filed an issue on github here:
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/2635 in case
people want to discuss there too.
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