[OSM-talk] historic=monument - is photo ok?

Ulf Lamping ulf.lamping at web.de
Sun Jul 8 23:28:01 BST 2007


Sebastian Spaeth schrieb:
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> Ulf Lamping wrote:
>   
>> As someone already started it for the highway topic, I've added example 
>> and photo columns for all topics of the map features page - IMHO after 
>> being filled with examples and photos, most of the newbie questions will 
>> be answered much more easily that way.
>>     
>
> Thanks for the work on that page. But I object to adding photos to the
> features. The list is long enough as it is and it becomes way longer if
> you add photos (although they are small) to it. I rather have a crisp
> overview page and more detailed information on dedicated pages.
>
>   
>> While I had a nice photo of a cemetery, I got in doubt with 
>> historic=monument.
>>     
>
> Because the pics have to be that small on the page they are close to
> useful. For example the cemetery which you deem nice... I first thought
> it depicts skyscrapers :-). 
Most of the pictures work well, even if zoomed to a very low level ... 
the cemetery might be a bad example here ;-)

The thing with pictures is: They bind the abstract definitions to a real 
world example that most people will find pretty helpful - and human 
beings remember pictures far better than the written word in a table - 
that's because icons have been introduced to computers ;-)

BTW: you can simply click on the picture, to see a larger version.

Example: Today, someone added a picture to waterway=stream. Seeing this, 
my recent question about waterway tagging would have been pointless 
about the stream. It simply clarifies things a lot especially to persons 
not really familiar with the english language :-)
> A small rendered icon might be ok, if it
> doesn't take up much space though.
>
> I agree that adding more info to many of the tags is useful. But I
> strongly vote for creating extra pages for those features and add a more
> detailed description, rendering examples, pictures and whathavenot there.
>
>
> An example of where this has been nicely done is here:
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Proposed_features/grade1-5
>
> I don't like the key, but having pictures there to explain the different
> key values is excellently done there
I've thought about this for more than an hour now and must say that IMHO 
we should keep this (at least for now). The map features page is already 
pretty large already today and will continue to grow in size in the 
future, as people *will* find new tags to add.

I totally agree that the "topic pages" are a good idea. What we 
currently missing (at least for most of the tags) is some more 
explanation of the tags: common examples, what key/value pairs are often 
used together with this tag (e.g. highway/oneway), what to avoid, 
related things, ... Most of the time today, newbies (like me) are asking 
exactly these questions - which is basically a waste of time for us all. 
A topic page like the mentioned "track grade page" would be a good place 
for this - the problem is: who will maintain it? I'll see what I can do, 
but the time is the limit ...

Unfortunately, you didn't say *why* you want to have a crisp page here. 
Currently, you will get around 17 printed pages and I don't see a reason 
why 34 pages would really hurt - if they would contain valuable 
information to ease actually using it. At least better than the current 
17 pages containing things that I scratch my head and leaves me pretty 
uncertain. BTW: Most of the time when I look at that page, I'll use 
"find" to find the things I'm looking for - as it's already too long to 
find them through a glimpse while scrolling - the crisp days are already 
over and more tags to come ;-)

If you mean to have a sort of reference card of the "available tags", 
then even the current page is far too much. I'm often finding myself 
asking something like: "was it amenity=parking or amenity=carpark?". 
Having a small reference card with only the very basic information (only 
topic, value, element, even without comment) could be helpful. So you 
can print it out and use it while tagging. But here you go again: The 
more stuff you have, the more stuff is to maintain ...

Regards, ULFL

P.S: Having meaningful pictures of all the map features, I could even 
think of a "picture reference card", with small pictures and the 
corresponding tags to use them. That would be probably much more the way 
people are in fact mapping things ;-)))





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