Wiki page for Key:industrial has been completely rewritten. Was this discussed or voted on?

I don’t know if it’s really that broad. From their function, the industrial process is always very similar for almost every type of plastic product: Plastic granulate is delivered, liquified by heat and then “put into form”, for example by injection molding or film blowing.

What do you mean by “different levels & perspectives”? I’d say the values on my list are quite consistent with their scope.

If the “type of factury/manufacturing facility/works” should not be stored in the industrial key and a “works” key or so be used - what is the benefit of using this other key? Most current industrial tags are on factories, and this “other key” would deprecate those uses.

"steel_mill" has 6.320.000 hits on google, "steelworks" has 4.730.000 hits and "steelmaking" has 3.860.000 hits. The difference is there.

This is an important point. No one should be required to deeply study the wiki pages or work there before being able to use those tags correctly. Tags like “factory:input” or “industrial_process” sound like good supplementary information in some cases, but nothing that should be required to reliably tag “type of industrial facility”. Even “product” can be surprisingly hard to research sometimes (unless one is being very general of course).

All mentions of this have already been removed from my version.

I am in no way modifying the use of man_made=works or product in my version. If you want to use product for type of industrial facility - then where does the product information go? industrial is a supplementary tag to those now, like it always was.

To change the pace a bit I decided to just start improving the map by retagging factory=* tags to the proper product=* tags, adding other tags like man_made=works where necessary.

Edit: there are too many for me and some cases are a bit more complex, so I made a MR challenge for us to improve the map together while we think of long-term solutions for factory tagging: Retag factory to product tags

That led me to https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:company - Honestly, making the mess even worse – That at the moment I found out that I could use man_made=works for a single estate and use landuse=industrial for the zoning - avoiding overlapping landuses.

That should IMO become standard practice, but the documentation hasn’t yet caught up.

I’m currently drafting a proposal for a new factory=* tag that should make man_made=works more useful. I’ll show it when I have more content to show. But a cleanup of current factory=* tags would be helpful.

1 Like

The tag seems pretty reasonable. What is broken?

I don’t like the idea of adding tags about a company to every facility they operate. Wherever possible, just use operator:wikidata and make sure the wikidata page has accurate info. I would consider company=* “out of scope” for OSM.

1 Like

Do you have better ideas at favoring your case? “steel works” is 6mn. At the same order of magnitude, a Google search is not a strong evidence for any difference. Bing has 47.6mn “steel mill” , and 135mn “steel works”.
Google Books shows “steel works” had been more numerous in British English, and is at similar level in recent decades. The difference is found in American English. Google Ngram Viewer

I guess this is a reference to the parallel thread about the dual uses of landuse=industrial and other landuse tags:

Your approach works fine, except that factories aren’t the only kind of industrial estate/complex/site. For some industrial sites, we have a verifiable name and well-defined property boundary but no specific top-level tag to explain what it is. Part of the original controversy in this thread was that industrial got hoisted up to a top-level feature tag as a solution to this problem. I think we’ll always need some kind of catch-all for industrial facilities that don’t have an obvious type word in English, if not landuse=industrial or industrial=* then something else.

2 Likes

I agree that we’ll always need a generic tag for edge cases, but industrial=* has never been formalised and has been subject to “any tags you like” to a great extent, and it would be nice if we could formalise tagging for industrial places a bit more. As I said I’m working on a draft right now that should at least partly address this matter.

1 Like

This seems to me exactly what the key industry=* does, that appeared a lot in this topic here.

we should not completely rely on wikidata, we can add these referrers additionally, but if the only thing we know about a company is that wikidata refers to them as 123, then we depend on them, and people might change the content on wikidata any time, likely according to slightly different criteria than us.

1 Like

company started out as a way to consolidate the many office tags that classify offices by industry, such as office=it and office=construction_company, under office=company. For this purpose, the key is well within OSM’s scope, because even a layperson passing by would easily recognize the difference between an IT office and a construction company’s office. On the other hand, if we apply this key more generally to any feature as a way to indicate some detail about the owner or operator’s line of business or corporate structure, then it becomes more tangential to OSM.

For example, this portion of an international airport is operated by a well-known IT company. I believe company=it would be off-topic for OSM on this landuse=industrial feature, or at least off-topic enough that I’m not inclined to spend much time tagging that kind of information systematically. The fact that I’ve instead paired the company’s name with Q3884 enhances OSM’s self-reliance, as a data consumer can now follow the link directly to more information rather than guessing based on the ambiguous name.

Once again, this topic is stale. To move on, I restored my version of the industrial key, including many suggestions from this thread, e.g. removing many controversial claims.
But as discussed, my edits to the page are not, or at the very least no longer significant changes to the definition/usage of the key.

Overview of problems from this thread to eventually consider when improving tagging of industrial facilities in the future:

  • what to do with man_made=works
  • how product=* should look
  • top level tag?, what to do with non-factory establishments
  • combination with landuse=industrial = when combine it, what is meant by it?
  • industrial=*/industry=*?
  • use the existing key(s) or create entirely new one?
  • vertical integration, different end products, different stages of productions
  • industrial=oil/gas, which are 40% of the use but very poorly defined
  • other questionable values at the existing key
  • clear differerence from related keys
  • industrial structures/facilities → different keys
  • industrial landuses/developments and place names
  • when is it craft, when industrial, when something else?
  • wikidata integration (on products)
  • how wide should industrial values be, what should be industrial values(storage, mining?)?
  • general: naming of values
  • company and office keys

→ and don’t forget: making the system usable for everyone (mappers & data consumers), not too complex ←

Hope I didn’t forget stuff.

Here we ago. Have you not learned? How do you find a stale discussion is an approval for you to reinstate your interpretation? Please do it in your proposal or user page. You are free to link to your version in the main page, but it doesn’t belong to you.

1 Like

All discussions from the last 11 years turned stale and nothing changed, how long is this supposed to go on?
Again, there is not “my interpretation”, I didn’t change the way the key is used (reverting previous entirely undiscussed changes to the definition dosen’t count).
Adding more examples and bringing structure into the value list also isn’t a thing which would require large proposals.

If you don’t like how this key was defined and is used -and I didn’t define it like it is, again-, it’s your task to go write a proposal if you know it better - not mine.

Why do you think engaging in an edit war is a good idea even when there is immediately new comments opposing your edit? Talk:Key:industrial - OpenStreetMap Wiki
Please think about your own responsibilities before telling others it’s somehow theirs. As much as false claims as “I didn’t define it like it is” , while conveniently ignoring and not disclaiming you created and started using many of them. At the very least, you are even free to document your usage together, but you shouldn’t remove nor change others. I already mentioned many other existing tags above that you overlooked, and are more numerous.

Didn’t you start it by reverting me?
I discussed what’s now a simple expansion of examples for over half a year, yes i’m “thinking about my responsibility”.
Of course I have created many of the values listed there, because no values existed previously and industrial is the key designated for such values.

I reverted to the first version of the page now - reverting actual significant changes to the definition, which have never been discussed.

Do I have to remind you who started this? Key:industrial: Difference between revisions - OpenStreetMap Wiki

User tguen started it by reverting my edits (and by other users) claiming my changes redefine the key.

Anyway, if we discuss something we should discuss something useful

Ah-hah! So it was in response to your edits after all. Stop blaming other people for your actions, or you will continue at your own peril sooner or later.

That said, the proposal I’ve worked on has indeed been low on my priority list. I’ll do my best to publish a draft before next weekend so we can continue the discussion from there. Other proposals are also more than welcome. We can put some good ideas together to make a proposal that most people can agree with.