[Talk-ca] Beginner questions

[Frank Cox]

Is this the right place to ask beginner (stupid) questions?  If not, someone
please steer me to where I should actually be.

As some of you already know, I have decided to make an effort to get my town
(Melville, Saskatchewan) on the map.  I have made a start, playing with JOSM
this afternoon, outlining this and labelling that.  This is obviously something
that can burn a lot of time, but I had quite a lot of fun fiddling around with
this and intend to continue with this little project.

I currently have a couple of questions for folks who know a lot more about this
than I do.

First, with regard to street classification.  I see, among others,
highway-tertiary, highway-unclassified and highway-residential.  What
classification should the streets in a town's commercial district be, i.e.
something like "Main Street"?  These streets don't really go anywhere other
than around the commercial district, so they're not exactly a route to anywhere
else, but they're not residential because it's a commercial district, and
they're not unclassified because they are the major streets in town.  So...
what should I call them?

On a related note, sometimes streets that are commercial on one end turn into
residential as they go further along.  So how do I classify that?  Make two
separate nodes, one for the north end of the street and one for the south end,
and label one residential and the other whatever you tell me in answer to my
first question above?  Or something else?

I seem to have somehow ended up with duplicate streets, side-by-side.  So the
obvious fix would probably be to delete one of them, leave the other, and name
and classify the one that's left.  Is this correct?

How accurate should I try to be with my building outlining?  I'm not much of an
artist, so sometimes my rectangles aren't particularly rectangular.  Is this a
problem or is the software smart enough to know that close enough is close
enough?

Also, how do you find the detailed information on the web page after entering
it?  For example, if I add a website or contact information to a building node,
how can I read that information if I go to the openstreetmap.org website and
search for my town?

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