Note: I am happy to use the translate button for your replies
I have created a site to analyse and fix phone numbers in OSM data and recently added Venezuela to it.
It has detected 6078 ‘invalid’ numbers, which is 69% of all phone values tagged in the country. Many of these issues seem to be because of a hyphen being used to separate parts of the number. Other issues are not including a country code or putting brackets around parts of the number.
I have an ongoing automated edit running in other countries to fix basic formatting issues like this and I would like to propose extending it to include Venezuela
However, first the issue of formatting needs to be discussed. Using hyphens in phone numbers is not common practice globally and the wiki largely recommends spaces to separate parts of a number.
How should phone numbers be formatted in OSM data in Venezuela?
Only spaces as separators
Only hyphens as separators
Any combination of space and hyphens
No separators at all
0voters
Please share this in any other relevant communication channels.
Thank you, this will be a great help, have my vote and support. I’ll communicate to other VE members via alternative channels. I’d expect others to agree.
One thing that I’d like to ask you for help, is that there was a mapper who added “place holders” for phone number like: +58212- This is only the country code and city code, so the result is an incomplete number in hundreds of POIs. Do you think you could do something with that to remove them all together?
While we’re here, there are 1649 objects with phone:call_center which I think should be moved to operator:phone. This is tagged on banks, pharmacies and post offices. I propose to move them in one changeset.
For the partial phones there are 480 values to be removed from 476 objects (some have a partial fax value as well). The full list is available here. I propose to remove those in a single, separate, changeset.
As for the poll, it’s also representative of how small Venezuelas community currently is (even two respondants don’t seem to be part of the community in Venezuela). I’m gonna try to promote more this space for that in the corresponding Telegram group.
It’s what I was thinking of, to poll over there. I might at least ask for opinions. Although I’m rethinking the options myself, after reading the wiki a bit more I’m not sure I understand the wrong part about the hyphens vs spaces. Is there software or people that have a problem with the hyphens?
I can imagine that if they were not present, a good localised software would be able to format it in a friendly way for locals.
I’m happy to allow either spaces or hyphens as valid spacing characters, or perhaps to allow a limited set of formats, which I have done recently in both Argentina and Brazil.
However, I still need a target format for any ‘invalid’ number, such as one without a country code or that has brackets in it.
