[Talk-GB] addr:place cleanup process

[Simon Poole]

This is again confusing internal data representation with the UI that is 
presented to the users collecting the data.

Any modern editor (or other UI) can display tag keys with location 
dependent values, so it is trivially possible to to display/Humpty 
Dumpty/ instead of /Suburb /for the key addr:suburb, or any other 
meaningful or meaningless text, in the UK.

Assuming that contributors using non-modern editors that don't do preset 
localisation (essentially that is JOSM) know what they are doing, I fail 
to see what the issue is supposed to be.

Simon

Am 15.01.2022 um 13:25 schrieb Mark Goodge:
>
>
> On 14/01/2022 19:07, Rob Nickerson wrote:
>>
>> If you have an address which has some settlement name before the 
>> postal town then there are only ever two tags that you need: 
>> addr:suburb and addr:city. The case we haven't yet worked out how to 
>> handle is when the address includes 3 settlements / settlement sub 
>> areas ("locality elements" in RM language). At that point we use 
>> addr:suburb for the smallest, addr:city for the largest and an as yet 
>> undefined tag for the middle.
>>
>> So "suburb" in addr:suburb should also not be interpreted based on 
>> our view of what a suburb is or isn't.
>
> The problem with this is that it goes against the normal meaning of 
> the word "suburb" in British English. Not every OSM editor is reading 
> this list, and not every OSM editor is going to read the wiki. So not 
> every editor is going to realise that "suburb" means something 
> different in OSM to what it does in everyday use. Which means that 
> people will, whether you want them to or not, use addr:hamlet, 
> addr:village, addr:town or whatever seems most appropriate, because 
> they simply don't know that OSM addr:* tags don't follow normal 
> English usage, and, without reading either the wiki or this list, have 
> no way of knowing.
>
> It seems to me there are really only three possible solutions to this:
>
> 1. Find some way to prevent people adding or editing addr:* tags until 
> they have shown they have read and understood the wiki.
>
> 2. Have an ongoing project of repeatedly correcting the wrong use of 
> addr:* tags.
>
> 3. Stop caring about it, and accept that, in the UK, addr:* tags will 
> be, and can be, duck-tagged.
>
> The first may seem attractive (and would result in a much cleaner 
> dataset), but I really don't see how it could be enforced. The second 
> is a lot of work, and is likely to result in edit wars where people 
> think that their edits are being wrongly changed by people who don't 
> understand the situation on the ground ("No, Kidsgrove isn't a suburb 
> of Stoke-on-Trent, it's a town in its own right"). So it seems to me 
> that only the last is a practical choice. It may upset the purists, 
> but if we genuinely want to encourage more OSM users to become OSM 
> editors then we need to accept that commonly used tags have to follow 
> normal English usage rather than requiring people to adopt 
> non-standard and non-intuitive terminology.
>
> Mark
>
> _______________________________________________
> Talk-GB mailing list
> Talk-GB at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/attachments/20220115/4d9d97f7/attachment.htm>
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: OpenPGP_signature
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 495 bytes
Desc: OpenPGP digital signature
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-gb/attachments/20220115/4d9d97f7/attachment.sig>