[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 24/04/2023 16:57, Mateusz Konieczny via talk wrote:
>
>
> Apr 22, 2023, 14:10 by ajt1047 at gmail.com:
>
>     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***.
>
> And that is exactly what lead to proposing this edits - I was writing 
> code to handle OSM
> data and researched tagging situation. And one of[1] effects was 
> discovering numerous
> cases of tags that seem to be exact duplicates of more standard ones, 
> and retagging
> them seems to clearly improve OSM data as far as I can see
>
Your continued tagfiddling here is making it much harder for local 
mappers to find problem values in OSM data.

No-one's going to complain about you changing "shop=shoe" to 
"shop=shoes" - they clearly have the same meaning, so changing the less 
common form to the more common form is a net benefit.

However, your recent changes have gone much further than this, included 
changing shops with values you don't understand into "shop=yes".  As an 
example, consider https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/353944525 .  It was 
previously "shop=retail", an unusual and rare tag that would likely flag 
up the interest of a passing local mapper.  You changed it to 
"shop=yes", of which there are 180,000 of in OSM.  No-one is going to 
spot that as an "unusual" shop at all.  This one's actually a charity 
shop, and a question about it on IRC would have got that response in 
only a few minutes (or a glance at taginfo/overpass: 
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/name=Lighthouse%20Charity%20Shop#overview 
/ https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1v3j ).

Changing "invalid" (by whatever definition) values to "valid but 
incorrect" ones does not improve the quality of OSM, and it actually 
hides problems so that they are much harder to fix in the future.

Do we perhaps need a StreetComplete quest searching for incorrect values 
set by "Mateusz Konieczny - bot account" so that they can be corrected 
to valid values? :)

In the case of the changesets that I've seen just now and commented on 
(see https://resultmaps.neis-one.org/osm-discussion-comments?uid=3199858 
) many are by longstanding contributors to OSM.  In many cases a comment 
on a previous changeset would have got the answer "yes, obviously that 
should be a shop=xyz" (rather than you just setting it to shop=yes).  I 
thought that after the discussion on 
https://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/134837986 that you weren't going 
to mass-change actual values to shop=yes any more, but clearly I was wrong.

Best Regards,

Andy

(for the avoidance of doubt, writing in a personal capacity)



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