[Tagging] Wiki: Key:level: proposed rewrite

[moltonel 3x Combo]

On 25/05/2015, pmailkeey . <pmailkeey at googlemail.com> wrote:
>> There are two distinct needs : enabling software to sort levels
>> for rendering and navigation  purposes, and the need to show the
>> textual name that humans expect. The "level=*" key is currently used
>> for the fist case (otherwise you'd see a lot more text values in
>> taginfo).
>
> Not necessarily as many buildings' floor names are numeric in nature.

Out of 127k uses, the first non-numeric level=* value in taginfo is
"unknown" (94 uses / 0.07%). Then come "story_1" (44 uses), "story_2"
(32), "from -1 to -2" (23), "primary" (17), "secondary" (16), "blue"
(10) and finally "UG" (6).

I think that if level=* was somewhat regularly used for the *name* of
a floor, we'd see a lot more of "Ground floor", "Lobby" or "G". The
idea that "4th floor" gets abbreviated to "4" doesn't explain the
values seen in taginfo. The only reason I see is that level=* is not a
name but a synthetic value used for OSM internals, just like leyer=*.