[Tagging] Hiking "guideposts" painted on rocks, trees etc.

[Paul Allen]

On Thu, 23 Jul 2020 at 17:34, Kevin Kenny <kevin.b.kenny at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Thu, Jul 23, 2020 at 10:23 AM Paul Allen <pla16021 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Sometimes 'expectations' turn out, on examination, to be 'cultural
> assumptions'. I tend to prefer, where possible, to interpret tags _sensu
> lato,_ because otherwise there's a tagging quandary any time something
> doesn't fit the definition _sensu stricto_.
>
> In the strict sense that you are advocating. I suspect that my area has
> absolutely nothing that you would call a 'guidepost',.
>

That may well be true.  And so you see that your square peg is small
enough to fit into the round hole without force being required.  It serves
the same function, as far as you are concerned, so it's the same thing:
information about a trail.

>
> https://www.flickr.com/photos/ke9tv/14276154341 is probably the closest,
> since the signs are outboard from the support, but even there, they aren't
> finger- or blade-shaped; they are rectangular signs hanging from a
> cantilevered arm.
>

I gave fingerpost examples in my previous post because that's what's common
in my country.  The tag is for guideposts rather than fingerposts, and many
of the wiki examples don't have blades or fingers either.  But they DO
have posts.

You got your square peg through the first round hole, but there's another
round hole, a smaller one, that your square peg also has to fit through.  A
different cultural expectation from the one I think you're assuming.

Here's an example I used to travel past regularly.  But that was years ago,
and the last time I saw it was a couple of years before I started mapping.
https://goo.gl/maps/fWvzsKneyMtSAFuW6  I remember roughly where it was,
but not well enough to map it, so I haven't added it. If I did map it,
standard carto
would show it as a stylized fingerpost.  If you were driving along this
long road,
you might note that the house you want to visit is the first one on the
left after
the fingerpost.  So you'd be looking for a fingerpost.  You might not notice
a rock on the ground daubed with some graffiti.  If you did notice the rock
you might not realize it was the "sign post" you were looking for.  At
typical
driving speeds you probably wouldn't have time to read the graffiti, and
even
if you did read it you might not realize that it was marking the trail you
expected to see a fingerpost for.  You probably wouldn't have looked
where the trail went anyway, as you were just concerned with seeing
a sign post.

Different cultural expectations.  You're looking for information about a
trail and don't care what form it takes.  I'm looking for a sign post and
don't care (unless there's another one close by) what it says or where
the trail leads.

-- 
Paul
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