Talk:Key:mast:type
Purpose of page
Hi. Why has this page been created without responding or addressing the original discussion?
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Tag:man_made%3Dmast
This page doesn’t discourage the use of this previously undocumented tag, which is not currently used by any data consumer, and already has an appropriate alternative.
Like I said before, tower:type is appropriate for masts, because it is not a top-level tag.
Let’s hypothesize how users would have to adapt:
Presently, mast communication infrastructure would be queried with:
“man_made”=“mast” and “tower:type”=“communication”
If you want the data as complete as possible you would add
“man_made”=“mast” and “mast:type”=“communication”
but if you discourage the use of this tag which is still presently ignored by all major data consumers, you don’t have to worry about adding this query to find the few thousand objects (<1% of data) that are incorrectly tagged.
If this tag was approved, users would query like this:
“man_made”=“mast” and “mast:type”=“communication”
but you have to consider that all editors use tower:type for mast tagging presently, so until all of them change over, you’ll have to still have to query tower:type.
“man_made”=“mast” and “tower:type”=“communication”
If all editors started using the new tagging, you would then have to have all users know how to correctly tag these objects, and older editors still may have to transition their mapping style.
Then, of course, you’ll have users that don’t understand the new tagging, and would add tower:type to masts, or mast:type to towers.
so you would still have to query for mast:type and tower:type for masts and now towers as well.
I’ve spent my fair share of time doing communication fixup, cleaning up objects incorrectly tagged as man_made=communications_tower, and it’s not fun or a good use of anyone’s time, especially if we’re introducing new tags for people to learn in an already pretty complex and confusing tagging scheme. --SherbetS (talk) 15:06, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
Possible synonym
@Adavidson: Hi, I don't quite understand what you mean by adding the PossibleSynonym tower:type box. I think it is very misleading and one might think tower:type would be wrong. So I would think it would be good to take this away again. --regards, Chris2map (talk) 22:44, 23 January 2023 (UTC)
Good point I had mistaken which way around the template works. Adavidson (talk) 01:32, 24 January 2023 (UTC)