[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 12:46, Mateusz Konieczny via talk wrote:
> when you search for tea shop and it was marked as
> shop=herbata ("herbata" is Polish for tea) then even a well written 
> search tool
> will fail to reliably find it.

Where something is an _absolute direct equivalent_ (but in another 
language) it makes no sense to use a distinct term (no-one's going to 
suggest "highway=autoweg" for motorways in the Netherlands, for 
example), but where there are genuine differences it does make sense to 
try and capture that somehow.

This also applies where English has borrowed a word that means something 
else elsewhere - for example, I bet all the "shop=boutique" at 
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1u5H don't match the OSM wiki's definition, 
but do match the French meaning of the word "boutique", which means "shop".

Even "poorly written" data consumers need to be aware of the data they 
are consuming.  With OSM, there is no single definition**. Someone 
trying to interpret data for the part of Togo that I linked above would 
surely say that https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/5001651960 (tagged 
only "shop=boutique") is just "some sort of shop".

More generally, anyone with half a brain consuming OSM shop data (or 
actually, _any_ external data from _anywhere_) will look at the values 
contained in it***.  The next time you're on a plane, ask yourself - "is 
it likely that the aircraft's systems have been tested with inputs from 
sensors out of the expected range of those sensors to ensure that they 
can deal with that input?".  The answer will of course be "yes".

Best Regards,

Andy


** we know that the OSM wiki does not describe the data in the Togo 
example.  It doesn't matter that it is the data that is wrong (in OSM 
terms); the OSM wiki still does not describe the data.

*** although some high-profile organisations have failed that most basic 
task (e.g. 
https://www.theguardian.com/games/2020/aug/21/melbourne-fawkner-suburbia-users-poke-fun-at-microsoft-flight-simulator-glitches 
).