A question about whether I can ‘just go ahead and do it’ by imposing what seems a sensible tagging schema on the wiki and on prior edits on the map, or whether more consensus should be sought.
I asked a question about water barriers at help.openstreetmap.org. The suggestion is that they should be tagged barrier=boom.
I changed the Key:Barriers page on the wiki, and then got on and drafted Tag:barrier=boom, which you can read on my userpage here.
I saw some taginfo data in the sidebar of the wiki draft, which took me to taginfo itself, where I get these results.
Without exhaustively looking at every one, the nodes with barrier=boom seem all to be indicating what in the wiki is called barrier=lift_gate. There’s a bunch in Melbourne (all by melb_guy), and a handful in northern Europe. I suspect this is a dialect thing, and that’s what people use ‘boom’ to mean.
All the ways seem to be floating water barriers like the one I want to map.
Ratio of ground features tagged with barrier=boom:
floating-boom:lift-gate | 24:12.
There’s also
Nodes: barrier=boom_gate (n=18)
Ways: barrier=floating_boom (n=1)
What’s the best way to proceed? Can I write up the wiki for barrier=boom and go and change all those node instances? Or since we have an ambiguous tag, is it better to seek to nudge the norm towards barrier=floating_boom (and change the existing cases?)
Or, since this is the de facto usage, are renderers clever enough to render barrier=boom on a node differently from barrier=boom on a way?
I’d document both meanings (you can put a warning box at the top) and perhaps for the node examples just add something like consider using lift_gate instead. Good images are always helpful. Worth noting that booms in some places are used to manage invasive plants like Water Hyacinth.
In my view we should try & document actual usage on the wiki not mandate a particular usage (descriptive not prescriptive). Additionally, it’s also better to persuade the person who made the original usage to change the tags (otherwise you may have to follow-up new things they map).
An amusing anecdote: after your query on Help, I looked at the local example which is mapped barrier=bollards (!) and has been that way for 12 years.
Thanks, that’s all very helpful. I’ve started adding a table of use cases (pictures, descriptions, maplinks) to the draft wiki page
Meanwhile, I discover that there are 107 uses of waterway=floating_barrier and I wonder if I shouldn’t use that tag after all, myself.
I’m sure Overpass Turbo can tell me how many of those were mapped by richardwest (I suspect most), but I couldn’t work out the syntax. Can anyone help there?
/*
This query looks for nodes, ways and relations
with the given key/value combination.
Choose your region and hit the Run button above!
*/
[out:json][timeout:25];
// gather results
(
// query part for: “barrier=cable_barrier”
way["waterway"="floating_barrier"]({{bbox}});
user["richardwest"]({{bbox}});
);
// print results
out body;
>;
out skel qt;