Hi,
I’ll be in Romania next two weeks. As a regular OSM contributor, I will obviously map whatever’s worth mapping but I’d like to ask if there’s anything I should specifically look out for. Any coordinated mapping effort currently underway? Hiking trail signposts, railway crossing reference numbers, speed limits, street post boxes, power line towers … ?
Also, are there any non-standard local mapping practices I should be aware of?
Cheers.
michalfabik, maybe is too late, but you can map what you consider is essential for you and then try to update the map with your mapped data.
Most important are, at least for me, speed restrictions, speed bumpers and railway crossing all items which should inform a driver in his way.
If you are passionate you can map also hiking trails.
Is up to you to put what do you think is important for others too.
Any update or item added is a useful for others too. 
Thanks for the tips. I’ve been back from my trip for about a week now and I spent most of the past week going through my notes and adding stuff to the map. Here are some issues that I’ve run into:
Sibiu has far too many zoos within a zoo.
I wasn’t sure how to map some addresses. This street has some apartment buildings around it, numbered 1 to 8A. Each building has several (usually three) numbered entrances and each entrance has a number of flats (e.g. entrance 1 has flats 1-24, entrance 2 has flats 25-48 etc.). On some buildings, there are tables that refer to each entrance as “bloc” and the whole building is “clădire” (IIRC), while on others the whole building is a “bloc” and the entrances are “intrare”. Furthermore, on some buildings the entrances are numbered 1-3, on others it’s A-C. For example, Aleea Streiu 1 is a “bloc 1” consisting of “intrare A”, “intrare B” and “intrare C”, while Aleea Streiu 2 is a “clădire 2” consisting of “bloc 1”, “bloc 2” and “bloc 3”. The name and number plates I saw on the buildings were multiple different designs, it was hard to tell which ones were (more) official, sometimes there were just home-printed signs sellotaped to the door. I tagged the building numbers as addr:housenumber and left the entrances alone. It should probably be checked by someone familiar with the Romanian addressing scheme.
I didn’t touch any speed limits because I wasn’t sure about this: Every time I entered a village, there was the usual traffic sign with the place name and another sign which, I assume, marks a built-up area. This second sign also has a speed limit on it, like here. What does this mean exactly? Normally, I would read it as: “you are entering a built-up area called so-and-so and you are allowed to drive this fast here”. However, all the other cars flat out ignored the speed limit and continued driving 90. So, I thought it might be more along the lines of “you are now entering the territory of so-and-so and if you encounter a built-up area within this territory, you’re only allowed to drive this fast through there”. Is this about right?
In quite a few places, hiking trails have ref’s or names such as “blue dot”, “red triangle” etc. (example). Obviously, I never saw any such English designation anywhere on site (guideposts, information boards etc.)
The user “Mihai Mandea” invented some strange English names for some Romanian villages. I commented on the changeset in question but I haven’t heard from him so far.
I tagged some unofficial camp sites (the ones with a couple of cars and tents by the roadside and no facilities) as backcountry=yes. It’s not entirely accurate according to the description on the wiki (for example, they usually are accessible by car) but I felt they should be distinguished from official paid camp sites with toilets, washrooms, a kitchenette etc. Another possibilty would be impromptu=yes, which isn’t quite accurate either.
I took many photos of guideposts for the Czech guidepost layer, to be used in various hiking apps. Sometimes I weren’t sure about guidepost names, if there were any. For example, the lower plate here seems to bear the route name for the red dot route and destinations for the other two routes, while here it looks like a name of the guidepost/locality and it’s common to all three routes. It seems there’s no consistent way of naming the guideposts but if there is any established way of tagging guidepost names / route names / destinations in Romania, I’ll be happy to fix this. So far, I only added the guidepost nodes and added them to the appropriate relation with the role “guidepost”.
Here is a small portion of a hiking trail that’s marked on the ground but I haven’t seen it listed on any information boards or maps that were posted nearby. It was hard to tell if it’s a new route that wasn’t yet in the maps, or an old route whose markings hadn’t been yet scrubbed off the trees.
This road has a sign like this posted next to it. I mapped the sign and tagged the road “hazard=dangerous_animals”. However, this tag is just a proposal. Is there an established way of tagging this? I imagine this must be a pretty common feature in some parts of Romania.
I think that’s about it. I’ll be very grateful for any suggestions, advice or requests for fixing stuff.
Happy mapping.