[OSM-talk] bot proposal: shop values cleanup (low use values only, 1 used 250 times, three over 100 times, many used less)

[Andy Townsend]

On 21/04/2023 12:17, Mateusz Konieczny via talk wrote:
> It helps because maintaining lists of many many many rarely used 
> meaningless values
> in every single QA tool and validator and tool doing this is annoying 
> at best.


For the avoidance of doubt we are NOT talking about meaningless values 
here.  We're also not talking about obvious misspellings, like the 
previously mentioned "shop=Chandlery" (that entry has a website that 
confirms that the tag is just misspelt).  We're not talking about 
genuine duplicates ("shop=healthcare" vs "shop=health_care") where 
literally no-one is going to assume a different meaning.

We're actually talking about the "long tail" of shop values - genuine, 
perfectly descriptive, perfectly valid values, like "shop=whisky" that 
someone mentioned on IRC this morning. Changing that to something 
generic without recording the extra detail somewhere (and communicating 
to data consumers where that extra detail has moved to) is essentially 
low-grade vandalism - removing detail from OSM.  It devalues the hard 
work of the people who surveyed these things in the first place.

You previously changed "shop=luxury" to "shop=yes" and then changed it 
back when I complained (see e.g. 
https://osm.mapki.com/history/node/2642857189 and 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/134837986 ).  As I said on that 
changeset, surely some of those values could be set to better actual 
values.  https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/2642857046 is part of a 
chain https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1u3W with variable tagging; the most 
popular of those would be better than "luxury", but either would be 
better than "yes": https://osm.mapki.com/history/node/2642857046 .  Some 
of the others (the unnamed ones) may benefit from a resurvey since they 
were added in 2014.

The fact that you find it "annoying" to deal with this detail in OSM is 
extremely disappointing.  I would have expected better.  It really isn't 
rocket science to deal with the "shop" key - it's just one key with a 
set of values.  If you want a challenge, try "historic" (though that is 
also possible: 
https://map.atownsend.org.uk/maps/map/map.html#17/-25.00937/135.17762 ).

Best Regards,

Andy