Import tags from OSM Help

[Stereo (Guillaume Rischard)]

Since the goal is to replace the help and forum sites, we should provide categories that replace the popular forums, and meet the needs of the popular tags at Tag list - OSM Help

[nukeador (Rubén Martín)]

Hi @Stereo and thanks for the suggestion, I’m moving this to a separate topic for visibility.

• How many tags you think we should import?
• Is there a way to get an export of them?

Thanks!

[TomH (Tom Hughes)]

I can probably pull a list out of the database if there’s no better way - no idea what the quality of the tags on help is though.

[nukeador (Rubén Martín)]

That would be great @TomH, I can mass import a csv file with one tag per line here.

Maybe we can check how tags with more than 20 usages are looking and decide based on that, maybe only the ones with more that 50 look better quality.

[TomH (Tom Hughes)]

I’ve created https://tomh.dev.openstreetmap.org/tags.csv which contains all tags with at least 10 mentions, which is about 10% of the total tags.

I think there’s a lot of noise and duplication there though and they will definitely need cleaning up before they are imported - just in the top ten there is osm and openstreetmap both of which seem pretty pointless as they will apply to almost everything.

There also a korean tag with over 100 uses that translates as something spammy - possibly a side effect of some spam run.

[nukeador (Rubén Martín)]

Maybe we can do a clean-up of the 50 or higher and then let if anything missing to be created organically?

• Note that >50 is still a considerable amount (171)
• 100 or more is 76
• 200 or more is 33

The other question is, how much we want to drive people to use the existing tags vs using the ones that are more useful for the new content that will be generated here?

[EdLoach]

@nukeador

The other question is, how much we want to drive people to use the existing tags vs using the ones that are more useful for the new content that will be generated here?

I think Discourse supports both categories and tags? If so would an “editing” category and “JOSM” and “IDeditor” tags make more sense than separate categories? Or would they be created as say sub-categories of editing (I don’t know how many levels of nesting are planned)?

[nukeador (Rubén Martín)]

The discussion about that is still happening, see for example some ideas about languages and different topic themes

Handling categories and languages

Also, we need to take in consideration that some themes are more popular in some languages and non-existent in others. Here is where I suspect tags can help alleviate the category-creation-need and opt for a more organic growth, where only when there is a significant volume of topics around the same theme that become distracting for other topics in the same category, we create a new subcategory for that. How to make decisions about this? I guess we’ll have to rely on language-communities to sel…

We could apply the same for Help & Support, start with tags and see if high volume tags need their own sub-category.

[cquest (Christian Quest)]

Discourse does not support nesting levels, there’s only category/sub-category + tags.

I thing it is enough to avoid complexity or fragmentation inside Discourse itself.

[TZorn]

I found the tagging on OSM Help quite useful. Unfortunately, many new users did not tag properly, i.e. they entered meaningless tags, just repeated the whole question as tags or ( unconsciously) created redundant/duplicate tags.

I find it a good idea that users can create new tags but I also think it is necessary (at least in the help category) that established users can update or add to the tags.

Already seeding the tag list with established ones from OSM Help would probably also help. We’d have to clean up Tom’s list a bit: unify redundant tags (address, addressing, addresses), remove meaningless ones (error, OSM), remove stubs from writing tags with spaces (no, on), etc. We would have to think what to do with language tags (lang-de, lang-es). I think that was discussed elsewhere.

[nukeador (Rubén Martín)]

It would be great if an experienced Help OSM contributor can volunteer to clean up the tag list Tom provided

[TZorn]

I can do that.

Is there a way to change tags of other users? The Trust Level description does not talk about tags, only about categories.

[nukeador (Rubén Martín)]

Our current settings should allow anyone to create and add tags (trust level 1 and above)

[TZorn]

I meant can experienced users change tags of other users’ questions after they were created? New/one-time help seekers often miss choosing appropriate tags. On Help that is possible. Here I could not find a way.

[nukeador (Rubén Martín)]

@TZorn

I meant can experienced users change tags of other users’ questions after they were created?

My understanding is that should be doable.

[TZorn]

I’ve taken Tom’s list and condensed it down to some 150 tags. I’ve put the list on the Wiki and included some explanations there.

My suggestion would be to use the tags from the first category and everything above 50 uses from the third category. But I welcome other opinions.

[StC]

Would it be possible to disambiguate explicitly between the cases where the word ‘tag’ is used to designate help topics and the cases where it is used to describe objects in OSM modeling?

Unless of course I get it wrong and they’re the same. In which case it would help if that was explicit too.

[nukeador (Rubén Martín)]

Might be related with the request here:

Automatically add tags to a topic based on keywords

Hi, @cquest has reminded me that we can automatically add specific tags when the forum detects specific keywords on the first post. [imagen] This might be helpful for when people is mentioning specific tools, or words and can help automate the organizations of topics. What do you think? What would be the keywords you think should trigger which tags? Cheers.

[TZorn]

Any feedback on my proposal?

Can we load the tags then? I’m happy to provide them in any other format (csv?) if preferred.

[TZorn]

In this topic we are explicitly talking about search tags in this forum, not about OSM attributes.