Note that “unusual and not documented” does not mean “wrong” - many should be simply documented.
Some may be fixable remotely:
clear typos (shop=suupermarket)
written in language other than English but with clear mapping to local language (for example shop selling meat in Polish is “mięsny”, so shop=mięsny is clearly shop=butcher)
too specialized tags (shop=coal is better tagged as shop=fuel fuel=coal, shop=office_furniture as shop=furniture furniture=office, shop=indian_spices as shop=spicescuisine=indian)
very clear duplicates (shop=hypermarket vs shop=supermarket)
shop with website, maybe even linked in OSM object, that allows establishing proper value of shop tag - it is also worth adding website tag
in some cases something is clearly not a shop (shop=factory_producing_widgets is likely man_made=works)
needed and valid shop value that should be documented at OSM wiki
Some may require resurvey, if one is luckily in your area you can check it. Or you can create a note and wait for local mapper to resurvey it.
Contacting original mapper may make sense.
Remember, it is better to not edit than break data in case of tagflidling - create note if unclear or unsure.
Let me know if this list is useful but outdated (I will setup refreshing it in such case) or pointless/problematic (I can delete it if it is causing more problems than benefits).
Some improvements can be made to this list… Mayvbe mark cases with nearby notes opened already so these can be skipped for now? And mark cases where website link is available so these can be processed first?
Cases on "entries from list of suspicious ones: " list can get explanations why this values are treated as invalid. Maybe more.
(helping here is useful as it allows to reduce number of not needed and pointless top-level shop values, on 2023-08-14 we had 11 215 distinct shop values, vast majority bogus, broken or not needed. Reviewing such lists also allows us to spot missing shop values, problems with documentation and presets. Repeated appearance of shop value may indicate that wiki or presets should be improved. Maybe iD translation is bad or requires additional aliases for easier search? Maybe OSM wiki would benefit from translating it to local language or being more clear?)
(I can also generate such listing for other areas, let me know if someone is interested)
Checked a few entries and they are correct, in a sense that the shop is specialised on a specific area which do not have a wiki page. Some of them can be probably “fixed” by broadening the tagging but I haven’t seen outrageously bad ones. Maybe others will walk through with more care.
it kind of depends on area, in some places there were many shop values in local language, in some there are good looking shop values in noticeably use where noone bothered (so far) to document them
My problem is that there are close to infinite amount of shop types. We have the standard, widespread ones, but I know a shop shelling horseshoes, other selling only syrup and jam (and that one actually has no staff but a box with the money), other selling rubber based stuff (wildly varying), or the one only selling pipes (mostly plastic)…
Often it’s a problem to categorise, for example, shop=do_it_yourself when it’s way too wide to match the reality (for example when they only sell screws). But I do not feel like creating 1000 shop types, some of which have a very few instances even in my country, not to mention elsewhere.
And yes, there are special local shops which you cannot find anywhere else. In fact “confectionery” is a decade long topic since hungarian “cukrászda” (or Austrian Konditorei) is not confectionery, they sell completely different kind of stuff, so we have (just as an example) a tagging which is used for wildly different entities, which is so very wrong. And shop= is often generic, and thus does not match the much more narrow profile of the actual shop. So people use name=* to specify, which is wrong on both ends…
No, I haven’t offered a solution, I know. Just explaining why I do not start generating shop wiki pages.
Well, ideally some tagging would be found to avoid 11 000 distinct shop values. Like we do not have separate top level shop values for shop=farm stand selling pumpkins, selling syrup and jam and one selling apples.
I am not proposing documenting every single in-use shop tag, only actually needed ones.
My problem is that there are close to infinite amount of shop types. We have the standard, widespread ones, but I know a shop shelling horseshoes, other selling only syrup and jam (and that one actually has no staff but a box with the money), other selling rubber based stuff (wildly varying), or the one only selling pipes (mostly plastic)…
true there are many shop types, with some occuring frequently and
others very rarely, but IMHO it still makes sense to have these rare
types tagged with specific tags, because it doesn’t help if you are
hungry and you look for a shop selling food and find one which only
sells syrup and jam, despite both being “food”, because it was
classified as a shop selling food. The strength of our open system is
we must not force mappers into weird classification decisions like
other mapping endeavors often do, we can have tags for specific shops
and become useful for special purposes.
And yes, there are special local shops which you cannot find anywhere else. In fact “confectionery” is a decade long topic since hungarian “cukrászda” (or Austrian Konditorei) is not confectionery, they sell completely different kind of stuff
I thought this was solved with shop=pastry a decade ago
(I can also generate such listing for other areas, let me know if someone is interested)
IMHO:
We can always query the actual values not recognized by the wiki from Geofabrik’s daily updated Taginfo
( for every keys AND for every regions supported by Geofabrik or any local taginfo )
Click “Overpass turbo” on the right side - for automatic search Hungarian “shop=pet_food” values.
Probably the simplest long-term solution would be to have a tab in Taginfo next to the key values, which already contains and filters out these values not existing in the wiki. This would make it clearer for every user to understand what these values are.
Summary: In any case, cleaning up the key-value pairs should be prioritized again within the Hungarian community. It might even be sensible to plan a campaign specifically for this task.
For me definintely not, since I imagine shop=farm being mainly for vegetables or dairy products and not mainly jams, syrups or, say, prepared animal skin or hand-carved stools.
If you look from the consumer side the tags are the “only” information which are searchable, so if I want to buy a rubber hose I may search for do_it_yourself shops but I never would find “farms” which sells actually a wide range of rubber hoses. Despite the fact that they also sell potato, which I don’t happen to search for.
Yes, I know, tagging never will be full-text description. Still, some categories are way too wide for everyday use and more specialised tagging is not (yet?) documented.
Maybe one problem is that we would like to have specialised tags so the specific kind of shops can be found (and differentiated) but we also need generic tags to prevent clients to implement enormous lookup tables to map various niche shops to generic (and searchable) categories.
Like you said, “food shop” is a generic category, which could include various kind of bakeries, convenience shops, supermarkets, whatever, but probably not pastry/confectionery and other sweetsshop.
Maybe we need shop:category=* tagging apart from very specific shop type tags.
Also interesting the low side of the count column, where the key is only used once. Many of them seem valid but use various spelling (singular, plural).
I agree that shop=olive_oil could seem too specific for a first level tag (maybe), but shop=food is way too generic and not what we are commonly doing (supermarket, convenience, greengrocer, seafood, farm, etc.)
Approach it as a user searching for something. The main category (you use as a search term) is probably “food” when you are looking for, well, food.
I usually have some idea which kind of food I am looking for, just looking for any food? Hm, maybe in the forest after loosing my way for quite some time.
Thing is that we already have a developed system for shops and amenities selling food. Is the new category only for everything we have forgotten so far, or should everything be retagged?
We do not have to tag “food” explicitly as such in order to provide food results for someone searching for “food” by the way.
