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_shrineorwayside_cross(or if you prefer, useplace_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_worshipvalues likeholy_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
buildingorservice_timesdon’t help, addplace_of_worship=church,mosque,temple,kingdom_halletc.
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 commonplace_of_worshipkey - If you see
denomination=catholic, consider converting toroman_catholicvalue. 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.