[OSM-newbies] Church, or not?

[Randy]

Isaac Wingfield wrote:

>...
>one I'm unsure about is when a location has a "place_of_worship"
>designation, but on-site inspection reveals that there is no obvious
>church there, or even a sign designating one.
>
>I've tried web searching on the names (wondering if the icons somehow
>got displaced), but that's been very frustrating. It would appear that
>a lot of "information sites", such as lists of churches offered by
>religious organizations, take their data from the same obsolete
>information sources that OSM used; they all point precisely to the
>place where the OSM "church" icon is, where there is nothing
>resembling a church....
>
>So here's the question: It's easy enough to tell a golf club from an
>industrial site just by walking past it, but a "place_of_worship" is
>perhaps not so clear; could one by located in a private home, with no
>external markers? If I find nothing but a house at a location where
>OSM has a place_of_worship icon, can I just delete it?
>
>Isaac

I've run into the same situation on one or two occasions, where a place of 
worship from TIGER data was located in an obviously wrong location. One 
was in an open area that had never contained a structure, at least it the 
45 years I have lived here. I looked for a reference in the phonebook, 
didn't find one, so deleted it.

If it is located at or very near a public building, such as a school, YMCA 
building, etc., then it may very well be that the building is serving 
multifunctions. Often churches will rent space in a public building while 
in the process of constructing their own building. In that case I would do 
some checking first, I think, since the data may or may not be obsolete. 
If it's at a residence with no signage, and the data is a couple of years 
old, it's probably obsolete, even if it was correct at some point in the 
past.

One possible situation is that the religious organization does not have a 
permanent location, and is using the leader, or another person's home 
address as a mailing address. I think I would be tempted to remove that 
POI anyway, since that is clearly not a place of public worship. As usual, 
others may differ.

-- 
Randy