[OSM-talk] contact: tags

[Richard Z.]

On Wed, May 06, 2015 at 11:37:41PM +0200, Andreas Goss wrote:
> >the verbosity may be unneeded for very simple things like phone
> >but is that true for everything covered by "contact*" ?
> >key:fax? key:twitter? key:vhf?
> >
> >So what would you do with those tags?
> 
> If we don't use contact for phone, it makes no sense at all to use it for
> something like social media etc.

it does make a lot of sense to catch all the less frequently used
contact methods which would otherwise require special treatment
and own documentation pages.
Maybe phone deserves special treatment but I would also prefer 
contact:phone over phone=* btw.

> In addition I think if the emphasis on contact was really that you can
> actually contact someone (contact:phone) then contact:twitter is also flat
> out wrong, because many companies will not reply and maybe not even read
> what you tweet them.

this is one of the reasons why contact:twitter is much better then 
twitter=* because the first one explicitly says it can be used for 
contacting while the other could mean anything else that you can 
do with twitter.
Likewise contact:website is reasonably clear while website=* may or 
may not offer a contact method. In addition most companies will have 
different web pages for different purposes and website=* would be 
typically the main page and not the contact form.

Another reason why I prefer contact:* over phone/vhf/drums main 
keys is that I believe mapping phone numbers and websites is not 
the mainstay of OSM so it is good to prevent too much polution of 
the key namespace with things like vhf=*.

Richard