Proposal for improving the shop=* wiki pages

Hi all

I recently went through most of the shop=* wiki pages and found, that the descriptions are in various cases incomplete, inhomogeneous or simply missing.

I thought about how to improve the structure of the wiki documentation for shops and subsequently came up with the following idea:
except for some already very well developed shop wiki pages and may be some exceptions due to their special nature we could use a common template for describing a particular type of shop in the OSM wiki.
Please note that this proposal is NOT meant to discuss any particular keys or values applicable to a specific shop map feature.

In order to demonstrate which kind of template I have in mind I have updated the English version of the wiki page for shop=shoes ( http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:shop=shoes ) as follows:

Section “Description”:
Contains the description for this shop as well as a link to the most relevant Wikipedia page in the same language.

Section “How to map”:
Provides some information regarding the different ways how to map the basic data type for this shop.

Section “Tagging”:
Provides detailed and complete information for all tags that are suitable for this particular type of shop but which are not suitable for ALL shops.
The last line of this section provides a link to http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Shop_supplementary_tags, which is a new page I added to the wiki and which holds most of the tags used in OSM that are suitable for shops.

Section “Example”:
This section contains some keys and values for demonstrating how this type of shop could be tagged.

Section “Proposed features”:
This section provides links to all proposals related to this type of shop if available. Otherwise it says "Currently no proposal exists for shop=* "

Section “Rendering”:
This section contains a set of important maps as well as the rendering of this type of shop on each of these maps.
The list of maps to be selected for this section of the wiki page is currently pretty unclear for me and I´d highly appreciate your recommendations in this regards.
This section also contains a list of other icons for this type of shop that can be found in the OSM wiki.

Section “Photos”:
Shows photos of shops of this type of shop.

Section “References”:
This section provides links to internal or external references if applicable.
If no references exist then “Currently no references are available.” is stated.

As soon as it seems that the majority of the participants in this discussion either agrees with this proposal or an updated version of it, I am planning to upload a blank template to the OSM wiki, which then can later be copied and used as an initial guideline for each new type of shop.
In addition existing shop wiki pages could be subsequently adopted to this template for further completion and homogeneity of the shop wiki pages.

Cheers Markus

Hi Markus,

thanks for your efforts improving the wiki! I’m not sure whether all shop types need their own wiki page. But for those shops that do warrant their own page, but as for those that do, here are my comments:

By convention, this section should be the introduction and should not have a heading, see
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Wiki_guidelines#Introduction

A “How to map” section is useful on key pages. However, on the pages for individual shops, it would inevitably repeat the same instructions over and over. I would therefore suggest moving this section to Key:shop.

Likewise, I would prefer if you added the content of your new page onto Key:shop. Then a single link would suffice for pointing an user to both the basic tagging instructions and additional tags. Such a link could be included at the start of the “Tagging” section.

Traditionally, links to proposals are included in a “See also” section at the bottom at the page (which is also suggested on Proposed features#Post-vote). Usually there are only 0 to 1 proposals, not enough for their own section.

Almost no page on the OSM wiki has references. I would omit that section if it is empty.

I always saw the sections “Tagging” and “How to map” as equivalent.
In fact, I usually translate them as the same term in portuguese.

One thing I was thinking recently: Perhaps we could use the tag instead of taking screenshots to show something in the wiki (example). This would guarantee a rendering is updated, but the main benefit would be ease of use (though this wouldn’t work for all cases).
About which maps to show: Maybe only the ones that actually show those shops. If not, then I think Mapnik, OpenMapSurfer, OpenCycleMap and Humanitarian OSM Map are some of the most popular.

About the “Tagging” section in the page Key:shop:
I believe it could be significantly reduced.
I don’t think we need to show variations and values, because the user typically needs to read the other wiki pages anyway. Also, the section “Examples” already will do that in the tag pages.
We could just have a table with the main key in right side and a brief description in the left side.

Other details:

  1. I’m not sure we should align the table of contents to the right. It looks quite odd to me.
  2. Maybe we could include the wikipedia link only in the “See also” section
  3. Usually I avoid saying things like “add such tag to the node/area” in the wiki, because this doesn’t make much sense for newbies editing in iD. Though some cases don’t leave a choice.

Hi both,

thank you very much for your replies. I appreciate your good ideas and valuable hints very much!

There are only 2 replies now after one week and 100+ visitors of the thread, so the interest in this issue seems to be rather low.
This means that we can proceed now with taking some conclusions / actions.

My conclusions are the following:

  1. Section Description:
    will have no headline according to the hint of Tordanik

  2. Section “How to map”:
    Approx. 50% of the existing shop=* wiki pages have such a section today. None of them has been added by myself. Most of them have been added long time ago and nobody changed it or opposed, so I think this section should remain.
    I fully understand the concern regarding redundant information, but in many cases this is the better solution anyhow because it makes it easer for newbees to get the full picture.
    A similar discussion exists e.g. for street names in addresses for years and the community has clearly voted for redundancy: the other option (using relations) is only used very little.
    Conclusion: I´ll put the “How to map” section in each shop=* wiki page as far as it not yet there. The existing ones will be homogenized.

  3. Section “Tagging”
    I think that it is the best approach to explain each parameter as done in shop=shoes for the following reasons and despite the fact that there might be some redundancy again:

a) this is already reality today in many shop wiki pages and nobody removed this wiki content for a long time so the mappers agreed with it.
My goal is not to change anything in the wiki, just to homogenize it across all SHOP wiki pages.
Examples:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:shop%3Dbutcher
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:shop%3Dconfectionery
and many many more

b) it makes sense:
the same parameter does not always have the same meaning for all parent tags.
Example: capacity: is this the number of beds or the number of rooms in a hotel? This information should be provided close to the information regarding the parent tag, not in a separate “capacity” wiki page.
Conclusion: I´ll continue as proposed

  1. Sections Proposed Features // References
    I agree with Tordanic and will combine them into section “See Also” at the end of the wiki page

  2. Rendering:
    jgpacker - would you be so kind to demonstrate by modifying the shop=shoes wiki page how this would look like for the shop=shoes example?
    Please explain how you will ensure that the particular map feature is not deleted or changed in the OSM database and therefore the rendering information removed from the wiki despite the fact that many other similar map features still exist.

Supplementary tags on the main “Shop” page:
I agree with Tordanic that this information should be on the Shop page. I have moved the information now there.
Could please someone help me to delete the obsolete copy of this information? Don´t know how to do that.
Showing the main tags only for each information section (e.g. addr: but not add:street, addr:house_number) is not optimal because the user would have to click quite often to see all fragments.
The way I have chosen allows to see the whole picture immediately.
Conclusion: I´ll proceed as proposed.

Table of content: we can also put it to the left, but I prefer to have it BESIDES the other content than below some of the content because this uses the capacity of the computer screen much better in many cases than the current solution which uses separate lines for the content. If it looks odd or not is a matter of taste and therefore not relevant.
jgpacker : if you have a better solution how to efficently use the upper most space of each wiki page I´m very happy to learn new ways how to do it.

There is also a Shops page: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Shops
Are you ok to integrate this also into the main Shop page?
According to the revision history it was extracted from there 3 years ago but I cannot find any related discussion nor can I see any reason to do so.

Cheers Markus

I agree that we should only show those that actually render the tag. However, I would allow every map that renders the tag to be included. Each of your suggested lists has entries that I don’t consider important at all, and is omitting other more interesting applications and render styles, so any selection feels too limited and subjective. Let’s address problems with overcrowding when and if they occur.

As for making the feature more automated, this would certainly be a good thing. However, I think it would be quite difficult to achieve.

For an uncontroversial deletion such as this one, replace the content with something like

{{delete|content has been merged into [[Key:shop]]}}

Then wait for an admin to delete it.

If you ever want to delete an older and more frequently edited page, use
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Template:Delete_proposal
first, without removing the content yet.

Rendering:
I think it makes a difference if rendering is unknown or if rendering was checked and the item is not rendered.
Can we agree that “not rendered” can be used but maps with unknown status should be removed?

To me this feels a bit like tagging bridge=no everywhere. So I don’t agree with it. However, if you want to do it like that, I won’t oppose you. As long as any map that supports the tag can be listed, the question whether others are also listed is not that important to me.

While I agree that the Wiki needs cleanup, I really don’t feel like shop= is a pressing issue. Most of the shop types are self explaining or on simple introduction sentence is enough. Apart from that using them is pretty much always works the same way. The only thing that is really important on the sub pages is the additional tags like shoes=… but at those you have to look on a individual basis.

Ok, it seems that I wrongly estimated the interest in cleaning up the SHOPS section, so I won´t proceed with this activity.
I just had seen all these stub pages and thought these hints are a request to fix these issues. My mistake.
Thank you for all your feedback! Have fun - today is a wonderful mapping day!