Keys / tags written whole in Caps or in 'proper' when small is the only thing accepted

General talk Tagging general discussion
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Time and again tags make it into the ‘new keys’ list because the first letter or the whole key is written in Caps. An example below of yesterdays entries

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Done it myself by actually setting up a custom parking preset with Fee instead of fee and so stumbled on that this morning.

Question is, is it absolute keys/tags are in small and if so would an automated check / convert to small in ID Editor and JOSM to name a few, even just a validation alert pre-upload be hard to implement and of benefit, at least this is truly one of the daily fixes the repair crew is occupied with and feels low a low hanging fruit.

What you say?

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To clarify terminology:
Uppercase are the large versions of letters ABC…
Lowercase are the small versions of letters abc…
Titlecase is a Way of Formatting Something that Capitalizes All Words (Except Connectors, OftenWrittenWithoutBreaks)
snake_case is a way of formatting where everything is lowercase connected by underscores.

In my view, tags are in british english, snake_case, with : as namespace indicator. I am not aware of anything that prescribes this. The technical limitations do not impose such a limit (allowing any Unicode string of at most 255 characters)

I did somewhat enforce this view in my GTFS tagging proposal, where a value becomes part of a key and in the process should be lowercased. For example: a relation with gtfs:feed=DE-NW-VRR can have elements with gtfs:stop_id:de-nw-vrr=*.

Can we ask the editors to check if a key has less than 100 uses in taginfo? That should not be an indication that a key should not be used, but as an extra check if there were no misspellings.

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This should be relatively easy. At least for spaces and uppercase ASCII

I would encourage you to create issue report for relevant editors if this is are not proposed already. And not implemented already.

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Although most keys are fully lowercase, there are plenty including uppercase letters with significant usage as well. Some examples:

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OK, so that check would then have to be ltd to the first word and if it has a colon included, before the first colon, but then I frequently type tags like the 3 part parking:left:orientatation or parking:right:restriction=no_parking

At any case thanks for pointing out the fly in the soup to ponder on.

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Sorry to put more flies in the soup, but…

Many of these examples are from imports and it could be decided that they should be all lowercase and changed with a bot edit. They do exist in the database currently though.

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