[Talk-ca] Community mailboxes

[Jarek Piórkowski]

Hi Andrew,

Thanks for writing in. This sounds good to me. The description "Canada
Post Community Mailbox" clearly needs to be removed from the name tag.

For operator, I suppose the slash name satisfies no one, as in much of
English-speaking Canada asking for Postes Canada would get you blank
looks, and I expect French-speaking Canada is not entirely thrilled
with having the English name first in their territory. That's before
getting into the fact that the French name is Postes Canada but the
tag says "Poste Canada".

Some possible options:
- Option 1: remove the operator altogether. While it can be useful on
normal postboxes to distinguish from FedEx drop-boxes or whatever, to
my knowledge no one else operates community mailboxes in Canada so
this tag is not necessary. The closest thing that comes to mind is
parcel pickup lockers but those are usually tagged
amenity=vending_machine + vending=parcel_pickup.
- Option 2: use name="Postes Canada" + name:en="Canada Post" +
name:fr="Postes Canada" in French-speaking areas, and use name="Canada
Post" in English-speaking areas. That's the usual way of handling
multilingual names in OSM, but I can see some difficulties in defining
what exactly is an "English-speaking" or "French-speaking" area, and
that's before getting into areas that are genuinely bilingual
- Option 3: remove all operator tags and instead add only
operator:wikidata=Q1032001 and let computers fetch the appropriate
name from Wikidata https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Q1032001

For the postbox type tag, the post_box:type=community tag appears to
have won its popularity largely through mechanical means
(https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/?key=post_box%3Atype&value=community#chronology
see mid-2017 and early 2021), however I find type=cmb is really a
quite bad tag (type=* is so generic) so I would support standardizing
on post_box:type=community now that we do have it, however it came
about.

--Jarek

On Thu, 9 Sept 2021 at 17:55, Andrew Lester <a-lester at shaw.ca> wrote:
>
> Hi all,
>
> Back in March, Dartmouthmapmaker made a mechanical edit (https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/100559754) where they changed all community mailboxes in Canada tagged with type=cmb and:
> -Gave them the name "Canada Post Community Mailbox"
> -Added the operator tag with the value "Canada Post/ Poste Canada"
> -Changed type=cmb to post_box:type=community
>
> I made a comment on that changeset at the time expressing my disapproval of the changes, but didn't pursue it any further. However, I think it's time we deal with the situation.
>
> Here are the problems I see with the change and how I propose that they be resolved:
> -Name: These mailboxes don't have names in reality. If any particular mailbox does indeed have a name (which I find unlikely), I highly doubt it's "Canada Post Community Mailbox". This artificial label should be removed from any mailboxes.
> -Operator: The operator value currently contains both of the bilingual versions of "Canada Post". I believe this should be split out into operator:en=Canada Post and operator:fr=Poste Canada
> -Type: While type=cmb was the documented recommendation for these for many years, I see that the Canadian tagging guidelines (https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Canadian_tagging_guidelines#Community_mailboxes) have since been updated to instead recommend post_box:type=community. Considering this change to the guidelines, I would support retaining this part of the original changeset.
>
> In summary, what I'm proposing is a mechanical edit where:
> -An Overpass search is performed for "amenity=post_box and name="Canada Post Community Mailbox" in Canada"
> -The name tag is removed
> -The operator tag is removed (or should this contain "Canada Post"?)
> -The tag operator:en is set to "Canada Post"
> -The tag operator:fr is set to "Poste Canada"
> -The tag post_box:type is retained, or set to post_box:type=community if not present
>
> The original changeset modified 8487 nodes, but an Overpass search now finds only 871 that still have that name, so it seems like many contributors have the same opinion as me and have already made some changes in their areas.
>
> What are your thoughts on the proposed actions? If there isn't any opposition in the next couple of weeks, I plan to go ahead and make these changes.
>
> Andrew Lester
> Victoria, BC
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