The tag marker=stile is the 8th most popular value around the UK, but isn’t used that much elsewhere. Does anyone know what it is? A wiki search pretty much draws a blank and there are no pictures.
Apparently - like stiles!
No idea, but today happened over a stile where there was no fence to the left nor the right, but in OSM data a path branching off at the very location, where in the changeset that created the path it said, the path running along a fence, which obviously got demolished: but not the stile. Can imagine though the stile serving as a marker for where the path goes, as otherwise it is not so easily found.
Even looking for more images.
For France, it should have two tags: marker=aerial barrier=stile.
You have many here:
Today passed one such (as shown in the linked panoramax photo) thing, not in a field but in the woods. It did not occur to me that this is something worth mapping. In case tasked with that, I’d have gone with barrier=entrance, not sure which side of it being inside though.
Is this it?
I’ve seen them around. The closer one is unadorned, whereas the further one has extra signage and the aerial hat thing
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Ah, now I see, I know this “hat” from bridges, with a number on it. I guess its for helicopter rescue operations. Would those then be marker=bridge?
Some oil and gas markers are designed to be visible from the air in aerial surveys – and the mechanisms for this is either (i) being very tall (and typically stripey or bright coloured) so that they stick out from all vegetation, or (ii) having these hats, or sometimes (iii) both. So if they fit into any of these categories (tall or with hat) they are generally recorded as “marker=aerial”. This may be with or without other tags (like "utility=gas” or "‘colour=”red and white”’). The hat is not (in any standardised way) recorded by itself, though. I.e. real hat implies aerial tag but aerial tag need not imply real hat.
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In France, the hat is the signature of an aerial marker.
Colours are standardized:
- red: power
- yellow: gas
- white: oil
- blue: water
Initially I tagged this marker with marker=aerial + support=stile.
One example:
You can remove the chains to get over the stile. See here:
I don’t think those white fence-like markers in the UK should be tagged as barrier=stile as they’re not there to function as stiles (i.e. a way for pedestrians to cross a linear barrier). But I think marker=stile makes sense to describe their appearance.
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Can you show some pictures of the “stiles” in UK? What is their usage? Marker?
The wiki page explains it a bit. They’re a way to let people cross fields without letting animals out. The marker=stile picture above does not function as a a stile, it just looks a bit like one (hence the big “private” sign to avoid confusion).
Edit: Tried to add some clarification, since what I’d written wasn’t clear enough to communicate effectively
I meant the marker=stile (subject of the thread), not the barrier=stile (meant for… stiles 
), therefore the quotes.