[Talk-GB] addr:place cleanup process

[Colin Smale]

Why seek to justify misuse of "suburb"? Why not use a more neutral tag that fits better, like "locality"? A lot of the discussions about tags over the past years have been based on the assumption that the key name should "do what it says on the tin", because misusing a tag for a preconceived result is "tagging for the renderer". Are you now suggesting that we let go of that premise, and allow tags to have arbitrary names (sequence numbers? UUIDs?), on the grounds that the UI can always fix it up for the user?

Not all usage of OSM data goes through a UI of course. If you download from the API or another source you will still be confronted with the "unfixed" tags.

> On 01/15/2022 3:21 PM Simon Poole <simon at poole.ch> wrote:
> 
> 
> 
> 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
> > 
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