[Tagging] Proposal to change key:man_made to key:human_made

Andrew Harvey andrew.harvey4 at gmail.com
Thu Oct 15 12:58:02 UTC 2020


On Thu, 15 Oct 2020 at 23:44, Volker Schmidt <voschix at gmail.com> wrote:

> May I remind my dear mapper friends, that tags are just that: tags. From
> the database point of view these are just couples of arbitrarily chosen,
> character strings. OSM uses a convention to make it easier to memorize
> these strings by using GB-English terms for them, but, I repeat that is
> just a convention to help our human brain facilities. If you were to
> replace the string "man_made" at every occurrence in the database and in
> all programs that use the database with "3rgnJI)oò-" this would make no
> difference to OSM (provided you use different strings for different
> keys/values), but it would make a huge differnce to the work of
> inserting/correcting/consulting data by human beings.
> In addition, replacing one string with another string in all occurrences
> in OSM, apart from creating completely unnecessary new versiones of the
> objects, is trivial. Changing all products that make use of these data will
> be an enormous amount of work.
> And all this effort achieve what?
>

Exactly. The human readable version of tags is done through things like
editor presets and partly via the wiki infoboxes, where they can be
localised into different languages and regions. The actual tag names bear
zero weight and it's impossible to have them accurate across regions. My
favourite one is track vs trail, where for me track is narrow that you can
only walk and tail is wide that you can drive on, but for other parts of
the world it's the opposite, track you can drive on and trail only walk.
That doesn't mean we'll change up highway=track as it's the description on
the wiki that matters not the name of the tag key and value.
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