I recently noticed that there is still some not insignificant use of the instagram=* tag, sitting at about 5400 uses. Compared to the more standardised contact:instagram=* tag with 280,000~ uses it’s clear which tag is favoured, especially given the iD editor defaults to the contact:*=* namespace when adding social media tags.
I would like to propose a one-off mechanical edit to convert all instagram=* tags to contact:instagram=*. I have written a script to handle this, including nuances with objects that contain both tags at once.
I have tested this script on the databases current set of instagram=* tagged objects, using this Overpass script (going one level deep is to ensure re-upload works properly. No contact tags are added to objects that didn’t already have an Instagram tag):
[out:xml][timeout:60];
nwr["contact:instagram"]["instagram"];
(._;>;);
out meta;
My script would be re-run and output data checked at edit-time to ensure the most up-to-date source data is used.
It looks like an attempt was made for this in 2021/22. Monitoring will be needed (by me) to ensure usage of this tag doesn’t continue to climb. Additionally, it may be worth looking into validator warnings for deprecated tag usage in the future.
It would be good to check if the link is a valid link to the site and not some mis-typed / mis-pasted / random content. I suppose the simplest test would be instagram~instagram or alternatively instagram=* and instagram!~instagram
I don’t think this is really possible to automate, as the contact:instagram=* format allows either the URL or username. We could potentially do a check for any that are a link but are not an Instagram link.
The biggest ones seem to be brand:instagram=* and operator:instagram=*.
operator:instagram=* seems to mostly been added by a mass import in the last few weeks in the Czech Republic, which I can’t seem to find a source or discussion for (which is another issue outside the scope of this edit).
brand:instagram=* seems to be limited to mostly the Czech Republic and Ireland.
I’m not too sure on my thoughts about both those tags. Potentially they could become brand:contact:instagram=* (and same for operator)? Alternatively they can be left, as the main issue is with instagram=* by itself. What do you think?
Definitely in support of this. I never know if it’s just “socialmedia” or “contact:socialmedia” and correcting the tag would definitely help me and many others.
Do you know if there is any particular source for the steep increase in the last year or so? The line doesn’t look vertical enough for a once off import, although I suppose it could be a staged import.
Given that most of the current tags were added quite recently it seems like a mass retagging without knowing the reason for that increase might not be productive - you could just have another 3-4k objects to retag in a year.
Please don’t try to change one out of dozens of contact-related tags. The issue of double tags contact:abc and abc is one that is by no means limited to Instagram.
If the short version is to be deprecated (and I’m very much in favor of doing so!), it should be done for all social media related tags at once.
brand:contact:* is almost non-existent (less than one per cent of all tagged brand social media contacts). I would rather deprecate the infixed version and stay with the short brand:abc.
Yes for not editing instagram= only. Again no for brand:instagram= , as it’s disorganized and unscalable, not allowing grouping and extending of new services. Worse, *:vk= or *:ok= being a language code for the format, and is almost the case in reality with multiple alpha-3 ones.
In fact, now I noticed contact:max= , which is the same as the North Moluccan Malay language. There are many more.
While I agree that it would be best to do this all at once, I don’t think we should “let perfect be the enemy of good” - this change alone is a positive one, so I support it.
contact:<media> has a different meaning than <media> itself, where the contact:* prefix tells me that I can actually contact someone there. Ideally, it would directly link to the contact page if available.
Most use though is for providing information - sometimes even just the general brand page without any specific value for this location. This belongs into a key separate from contact in my opinion.
So <media> tells me that there is something on Instagram/Facebook/Website/etc. No specifics given. contact:<media> is narrower in its meaning and thus not an automatic replacement.
As to the broader point - this does affect all social media, so any decision should take them into account. Having a proposal for this would certainly help to establish a guideline, deprecations will likely not succeed.
With contact:website= being the 2nd, and mostly not contacting contact:youtube= , any meaning has been lost there. Personally I do use contact:website= for web contact forms (although that’s an email shell), or something that’s neither a branch-unique website= nor operator:website= / brand:website= , to prevent it from being entered in website= wrongly.
The entire area isn’t able to find a consensus. What I hear when you say “mappers” is “editors” like iD which just choose some default (and whoever imported the contact:instagram tags).
At best, you can argue that the tag is meaningless, so what gives if we change it from one to the other? At worst, it actually gets treated as a contact.
I think your interpretation of contact might be too literal in this case. Does contact:webcam mean there is some way I can communicate with someone through the webcam URL? I think these are mostly synonymous with the prefixless version of the tags.
I’d say contact:<media> is appropriate because most social media websites let you communicate with the people running the account through commenting on posts/videos and/or sending direct messages (depending on the page’s privacy settings of course and whether the page owners are responsive, but the functionality is generally there). Even just liking or subscribing is a form of contact.
To be fair, that’s a more special case, not as numerous, and wasn’t discussed. There’s no explanation why or how should website= (I can understand that) or url= (better for the raw live feed directly) not be used.
For the topic, something I discussed before is whether contact:webcam= could be used on the feature that the cam has been intentionally set up to capture. This would be similar to wikimedia_commons= / flickr= etc image= , and video= with some problems. So some other *:instagram= / *:youtube= might theoretically be used for describing the object, again obviously with its own problems. But for the purpose of discussion, indeed 396 unique image= are Instagram, and 32 youtube= are videos. contact:flickr= does distinguish this.
Let’s not get as extreme as discussing liking or subscribing. Commenting is enough is already.
Pedantically, contacting can be “touching” or connecting, getting to know its info only, as in “radar contact”. But this is not the expected meaning. Furthermore, quite a few are not designed or intended for communicating or inquiries.
In the most literal sense, contact:* would mean some information to contact the object itself. Most of the time, the object can’t be contacted and that’s not useful, rather I want to contact the people responsible for it (or feeling responsible for it). In that sense, contact:webcam is actually an even more literal interpretation - contact this object (in this case a webcam) via the given url.
As such, it’s a completely different scheme that just happens to use a different meaning of contact - The word “contact” is quite broad. Using the broadest possible definition isn’t always useful.
