How to tag an artificial climbing/bouldering wall outside?

General talk Tagging general discussion
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The wiki page for sport=climbing recommends tagging an artificial climbing wall outside with leisure=sports_centre + climbing=yes, a natural one with natural=cliff and an indoor climbing wall with building=yes.

I think that’s quite unusual. Especially using leisure=sports_centre seems inappriopriate given that wiki page for that tag says:

a single leisure=pitch is not usually a sports centre, leisure=sports_centre is for significant facilities.

Given that is also says:

It can be a building (indoor sports centre), just outside (outdoor sports centre) or contain indoor and outdoor sports features mixed together.

I would say that for a significant climbing park, leisure=sports_centre can be appropriate, but a single wall should probably rather be tagged as something else.

Do you agree? And what should a single climbing wall be tagged as? leisure=pitch?leisure=fitness_station?

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I would tag it as leisure=climbing_site.

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I think it depends, not saying a different tag couldn’t be more appropriate, but a single climbing wall can also be significant.

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Nul points from taginfo for that.

What people tend to do is, for outdoor natural features, add sport=climbing or climbing=boulder to the existing tags on the natural feature. There’s some example code to detect that for this map, here.

For artificial features they tend** to use leisure=pitch; sport=climbing, code here, example here.

There’s a lot to unpack here. Unfortunately lots of wiki pages are created by well-meaning people who didn’t bother to look at how things are actually tagged and didn’t bother to discuss with anything else, so you’re right to raise it here.

An artificial climbing wall may well be within a leisure=sports_centre and within a building=yes, but it is unlikely to form the entirety of either of those in its own right. One exception to the latter is the tagging tower:type=climbing; man_made=tower which does see some use.

** based on me going through OSM data in UK/IE looking for anything vaguely natural, leisure and sport, as well as other keys. tower:type=climbing was a surprise to me and I wouldn’t have found it had I not looked at taginfo for that key.

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Thanks for your valuable input! I updated the wiki pages for Climbing and sport=climbing with info about leisure=pitch, leisure=sports_hall and a few other possible tags.

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@SomeoneElse, @GorgorMith:

Would it make sense to add outdoor=yes? :thinking:

(My example)

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The wiki page for outdoor=yes actually uses climbing features as its first example. So it seems like a common use case for it.

Personally, I have some trouble understanding the indoor/outdoor tags. Shouldn’t it usually be clear that a feature is indoor when it’s inside a building area (except for open building parts like colonnades)? Conversely, if it’s not inside a building area, I would assume that it’s outside, right?

Could you help me understand the use case for these tags?

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It doesn’t seem to be a commonly used combination - at least taginfo does not think so. I can see 16 in UK and IE.

I can imagine cases where people might add it and why, though.