I was using the ID editor, in my browser, and noticed a pop out dialogue that listed things such as shops that didn’t have the correct tags. Clicking on these seemed to be a straightforward way to improve OSM. I’d like to do more work in validating this kind of problem.
Can anyone point me to a tool that would help generate these issues?
I had a look on the wiki, but couldn’t find anything.
There’s a section on the wiki https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Quality_assurance that has got a good few links in it. In each case though it’s about “highlighting things that might need a second look”. Please don’t take any in-editor suggestions as gospel, though - there was an example of a steakhouse in Burkina Faso called “Mac Donald” that suffered occasionally from people assuming it was a burger joint rather than a nice steak restaurant and “correcting” the spelling. More recently, there have been problems with iD thinking that all pizza places called “Gino’s” were part of the same chain when there are at least two, plus who-knows-how-many privately run places established by someone called “Gino”.
If you’re familiar with an area, and you know that a “shop=Mary’s” really is the well-known brand “Mary’s” as opposed to just run by someone called Mary, then of course it makes sense to accept iD’s brand suggestions. If you’re not familiar with the area it’s really not a good idea to accept suggestions such as this.
However, lots of automatic suggestions probably don’t need a personal survey = you can guess what someone meant when they tagged something “highway=pirmary”, or if you see a hole in a road network and imagery and other sources make it clear it clear that that it’s really a through road it would make sense to correct that too.