Help us identify significant places of worship

A the Belgian National Crisis Center, we use amenity=place_of_worship to identify churches and other significant religious facilities. But for many of these places, we have no way to guess what kind of place of worship this is. Maybe it’s a huge church, maybe it’s just a wayside chapel. Starting with the 729 places we can’t even make a guess about, you can help us at this Maproulette challenge. Don’t start before you read the instructions! I copied them here for better readability. Let me know if you see any issues.*
Feel free to Skip or mark as Can’t complete if you don’t find a solution (leave a comment!). If you are not 100% sure of your solution, mark for review and leave a comment.*

Small places

  • add historic=wayside_shrine or wayside_cross (or if you prefer, use place_of_worship=*).
  • if you can actually enter and it’s mapped as a building, set building=chapel
  • if you can enter but it’s mapped as a point, use place_of_worship=chapel
  • other relatively common small places are place_of_worship values like holy_well, lourdes_grotto, calvary. More options at place_of_worship wiki page
  • is it really worth having the tag amenity=place_of_worship? Use your own judgement.

Large places

  • if the amenity is on a building, refine the building type, e.g. building=church, mosque, temple, kingdom_hall (only if the place was purpose-built for such use!)
  • if the place is mapped as a point, try to merge it to the building and set a specific building type
  • if they are easy to find, add service_times (wiki)
  • if building or service_times don’t help, add place_of_worship=church, mosque, temple, kingdom_hall etc.

Other things

  • Mind the duplicates! If there is both an amenity on a polygon and on a node, then you can probably move tags to the polygon and delete the node.
  • Maybe it’s not a place of worship at all. It could be a community_centre instead, or have been closed by now. Re-tag or leave a comment.
  • If you see place_of_worship:type, consider converting it to more common place_of_worship key
  • If you see denomination=catholic, consider converting to roman_catholic value. This is almost always correct in Belgium.

For more context, see my diary post on the subject. More tasks will follow with the places where we can only take a guess as to the size of the place.

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