I am a new user and bad-eyesighted, but i like to contribute to Streetmap as good as possible. I have a little problem with drawing buildings in Potlatch. When i draw the lines and connect them to make a closed loop a want to tag it as a building, but the menu’s and listbox does not show “Building”, only “Building site”. How do i mark or construct a Building? It is a lot of trouble for me to look through manuals. I have to use a looking glass to read.
I need this information a little urgent because i have made a mistake in a map: a building is not a building anymore but a road. I want to correct it a.s.a.p.
I’m not sure if the tag for building is in the Potlatch preset menu anywhere. But you can add any tags you like, whether they are in the presets or not.
To do this, click on the little “+” symbol, in the bottom right corner (just above the Save button). This will add a new blank tag.
Then type building in the box where it says “key”, and type yes in the box for value.
Then that object will be tagged as a building, so you can save it to add it to OSM.
If you have added a tag you don’t want, you can click on the little “x” next to the box for the value to remove it. or you can just delete all of the text in the box for the key.
Its worth reading the Potlatch primer which explains all this: http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Potlatch/Primer#Editing_tags
The presets in Potlatch are just a small selection of what the programers think are the “most needed” tags. You can add any tag you like as described above, also every day (OK perhaps not that frequent) new tags are invented. You can also use the “+”-Key on the keyboard to add new tag. I find this more handy using keyboard-shortcuts than pushing the mouse. Have a look at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Potlatch/Keyboard_shortcuts !