Mechanical Edits/Mateusz Konieczny - bot account/moving building=building to building=yes (again)

Page content created as advised on Automated_Edits_code_of_conduct#Document_and_discuss_your_plans.

Who

I, Mateusz Konieczny using my bot account

contact

message via OSM I will respond also to PMs to the bot account. In both cases I will be notified about incoming PMs via email and notifications in OSM editors.

What

Retagging building=building to building=yes.

Why

building=yes is a standard way to mark building without specifying its type. Editors wishing to specify building type would (directly or indirectly, for example using StreetComplete) look through buildings tagged as building=yes.

building=building is an unexpected way to mark building without specifying its type and therefore retagging this duplicate to building=yes would improve tagging without any information loss.

Numbers

Large enough to make automated rather than manual edit worth it.

Between 400 and 500 objects are expected to be edited. See https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/building=building#map for a geographic distribution.

How

building=building tag would be replaced by building=yes

An example:
state before a mechanical edit:

• building=building

state after a mechanical edit:

• building=yes

Changeset would be described and tagged with tags that mark it as automatic, provide link to discussion approving edit, link repository with source code etc. It would include at least

• automatic=yes
• bot=yes
• created_by=osmapi/1.0.2
• discussion_before_edits=https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2018-June/080805.html
• source_code=link to a github repository

Changeset would be split into small areas to avoid continent-sized bounding boxes. As this tag is on buildings it is not expected that any object will force bounding box to be extremely large.

Edits would be generated by an osmapi based program.

Discussion

talk mail list - https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/2025-May/088691.html

community forum - https://community.openstreetmap.org/t/proposed-automated-edit-building-building-to-building-yes/130423

Repetition

This edit will be rerun from time to time in the future.

Opt-out

Please comment in the discussion thread (see #Discussion).

See also

• Mechanical Edits/Mateusz Konieczny - bot account/moving building=building to building=yes - 2018 edit