Should I tag student flat names? If so, how?

Dunedin is known for its student culture, and part of it is flats all around the city having their own names. These names are often on a sign that’s visible from the street. The students come up with them, and while they can change (and they do change) it’s very common to respect the name of a flat you’re moving into, and therefore many flats have very well-known names, even after the sign is removed or they’re renamed. These names are also very often the main way to refer to a flat.


Lots of times these names will be quite stupid and unique, but other times they might take after existing buildings or features. In one instance, for example, a flat is dubbed the “Dunedin Casino”, after the former tenants stole a sign from the actual casino and put it on their front yard.

Should these names be mapped? They’re, after all, on-the-ground, and could serve useful for navigation or wayfinding. Flats are also actually known and referred to by their names, so they’re not a gimmick.

On the other hand, I’m afraid that some names like the Dunedin Casino or Trump Tower could result confusing to people looking for the features by these names when they’re redirected to a random student flat (probably not what they were looking for, even if they share a name).

And lastly, what tag should I use? I fear name=* might feature too prominently, but would fearing this be mapping for the renderer? Or is it founded and I should go with alt_name=*?

I’m not sure if it would help, but maybe you could use loc_name.

What I am also wondering is how long these names are “valid”? Are these names the same for years or do they change constantly as the students change?

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Many of them last for years, actually. If I had to give a number I would say that about half of them last 5 years or more

that is unfortunate but it should be fixed (and is fixable) by such geocoders - note that geocoder can judge importance in number of ways, such as checking whether object is prominent enough to have wikipedia or at least wikidata entry

avoiding tagging of valid names seems to be a bit of Tagging for the renderer - OpenStreetMap Wiki (and removing them almost certainly would be)

also, such situation (prominent object, minor ones with the same name) is not limited to this case anyway

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I don’t really see a problem with tagging those as name=* on the building. Even less so with loc_name=*.

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I think I would use addr:housename in this case.

In my humble opinion, the name here is not part of the addr:, hence I’d prefer the name or loc_name tag.

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Seems there is consensus in using loc_name=* for this use-case! I will map them this way.

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