Template talk:How to map as a node or area

"area around the building"

Hi! The area for, say, a hairdresser should be drawn around the area occupied by the shop. Unless there are no other occupants, this is not the same as the building that the hairdresser occupies! Considering that this mistake is even part of the name of the template, I decided to discuss it, rather than fix it myself. --Tordanik 10:30, 20 January 2016 (UTC)

As the current status, it is described differently by each tags. Some pages (e.g. amenity=school [1]) describes that features should be drawn around the land area, and other pages (e.g. tourism=information [2]) says that features should be drawn around the building outline. This template is for later tags. But as using this template, it can be changed quickly after a discussion.

I think the tag can be also applied to a building because a border of an area of an amenity is often unclear, for example, there can be a hairdresser shop and its owner's house in the same land area together. --Mfuji (talk) 09:26, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

The pages that mentioned "the outline of the building" were incorrect in the first place, though. If a shop only occupies one room of a building, the area should not encompass the whole building. Likewise, if the shop encompasses multiple buildings or other features (e.g. outdoor areas), then the area should be larger than just the building. Schools are not a special case here: Ideally, the area should always be as large as the feature is in reality. That's why I believe this template's name and content should be changed. Right now, it reinforces a common mistake in documentation pages. --Tordanik 15:25, 12 June 2016 (UTC)

Tag it with key=value and name.

Perhaps we should add the phrase 'Tag it with shop=watches and name=*.'? Of course the key value from title. I think that should be possible to take it from the title. --geozeisig (talk) 07:25, 21 January 2016 (UTC)

How to Map for shops

The user Mateusz Konieczny changes the texts in: "Set a node or draw as an area along the object outline.". The template before was actually well thought out, not too much or too little. What do you think about it? --geozeisig (talk) 07:07, 20 January 2018 (UTC)

If you think that one of my edits is wrong please (a) link such edit (b) write on my talk page (you can use https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=User_talk:Mateusz_Konieczny&action=edit&section=new ) so I know about it Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 08:47, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

What is the benefit of the template?

It just makes editing harder for a typical user, especially during translating. Maybe it saves a bit of time for somebody experienced with templates, but otherwise user will be left confused. Is there any reason that justifies keeping it in articles? Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 21:05, 1 March 2018 (UTC)

Harder, not really, it is translated once and is self-reading. What is complex is including the links and finding the relevant ones: the expansion with links and icons is longer and more complicate to read! So the complexity is handled only once per language. When you start translating a feature, you get it immediately, nothing to change... It was made for this purpose, just like there are templates for creating the infobox, and find relevant links for tags key=value, and generate tricky links for Taginfo.

Centralizing this just reduces the maintenance because it is frequently used for various POI types. I did not create it, but I maintained it so it continues working as intended without the complexity to handle on each page using it (e.g. updating long lists of pages when feature types are moved/renamed, updating various redirects to avoid them or to solve double redirects left, and so on. Is that tempalte difficult internally to read and translate? Not really and it is done once. You don't care then about all other pages, they'll get updated automatically. — Verdy_p ^(talk) 02:13, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Polish page should be editable without requiring knowledge of English. {{How to map as a node or area|pl}} is horrible as it requires both knowledge of English and mediawiki templates. Mass replace is also not truly helpful - before https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Template:How_to_map_as_a_node_or_area&diff=prev&oldid=1578742 this template was not fitting on shop pages, after that change it is not fitting on building pages. Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 08:38, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

@Verdy_p - I know that you are great with Mediawiki templates, but typical person is not. Random editor from Poland will not know how {{How to map as a node or area}} is autotraslatable. And benefit of that template are not big enough to justify making article text significantly harder to edit and translate for users that are not Mediawiki experts Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 08:44, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

Any translation to do on this wiki requires being able to read English. And Also to know the basic MediaWiki syntax (much less complex to understand a single pair of frances than multiple links ans multiple inclusions of templates... I don't understand your rationale, you contradict yourself. And you just want to ignore the cost of maintenance. We don't have to understand what to do, when we translate we copy-paste blocks from the English page and then replace what is needed.

People know that it is autotranslatable: they copy-paste a page, and start pediting: the preview gives them instant results. They can also use the visual editor which renders expanded template directly.

In all cases we need basic training about how te wiki works, and we provide documentation as much as possible with examples to reduce the learning process, but we can never eliminate it completely (otherwise people would just type everything they want in a page and would not get the result they expect. All is done continuous by looking at the existant and mirroring it. This is the standard way to work here (and even to be able to discuss on these pages). And this is not specific to this wiki, but common on all wikis based on Mediawiki (including those from Wikimedia, and there are many millions users that have been able to do things). Even on OSM we need to learn by example: terminology, methods, tools and softwares, online applications, tag conventions: there's lot to learn all the time and a couple of braces which is just present on similar pages is not a problem to copy-paste as is. — Verdy_p ^(talk) 10:19, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

It's not an insurmountable obstacle, but I share the feeling that this kind of template makes pages just that little bit more confusing to edit. And it offers at most a very small benefit for maintenance, as having to type/translate that single sentence is negligible compared to the overall effort. As for your comparison with Wikipedia and similar wikis, in my experience they're not typically using templates for sentences in paragraphs of regular text.

My main issue with the template, however, is the very abstract language it produces, e.g. by referring to "the feature" instead of using more specific words ("the barber shop"). In my opinion, this does not make for good reading. --Tordanik 19:25, 2 March 2018 (UTC)

"The feature" is the term used for the English translation, it is standard everywhere on OSM. The definite article refers directly to the subject of the page. This is also implicit in the title of the section where it is used: "How to map", or similar: there's the same implicit assumption this refers to the same feature type descried by the page title and its infobox.

"it is standard everywhere on OSM" [citation needed] that it is standard to use "feature" rather than name of a specific object. From my experience of reading discussions and explanations word "feature" is generally used only where using more specific word is impossible Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 07:15, 3 March 2018 (UTC)

Additionally we don't need a repetition of the word in the same paragraph added after it refering to "name of the shop". This does not clarify anything but makes the style unnecessarily weighty and repetitive, i.e. boring. But if you want I can add a parameter to replace the noun "object", but I don't see any valuie in adding this complexity you were arguing that this is obscure even though the template name is self-descriptive (not always the case of various frequently used templates on the wiki which use abbreviations, but they are fine because their usage is so frequent and because they are properly documented; if not I take the time to document it clearly and with a clean presentation which allows easy reding and distinction of what is to type, and what is returned, with with correct examples to show particular cases or indicate possible caveats: almost nobody documents as much as me what he does, and many use randomly chosen names and don't care at all about typos, or make incorrect assumptions about translatability or the effective language that will be used; this wiki lacks people to do the maintenance and if I did not do that, it would have become a huge haystack, where nothing can be found. Even TagInfo would still not exist without the structuration work and maintenance I do with lot of work, to also preserve as much as possible what others have done or have tried to do without success!) — Verdy_p ^(talk) 20:46, 2 March 2018 (UTC)