I am trying to figure out a way of cleaning up incorrect chain store data in OSM. For example there are 1422 instances of "McDonalds" in OSM (should be McDonald's) and 203 instances of "Tim Horton's" (should be Tim Hortons).
I have created pages on the OSM wiki called <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Chain_Store_Cleanup> and <http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Chain_Store_Directory>. Ideally I would like to create wiki pages for every large chain of stores in the world that is similar to Map Features, with recommended ways of tagging chain stores. A lot of new OSM users get this wrong and create incorrect data, and there wasn't anything on the wiki telling users that "McDonalds" or "Tim Horton's" is incorrect. This is really preliminary and I'm sure that this can be improved a great deal. I would also like to keep track of chain stores that have closed stores or changed name. For example, Target closed all its stores in Canada recently and Wal-Mart changed the name of all its stores to Walmart a few years ago. Do people mind if I start fixing these errors myself, finding POIs with overpass turbo and editing individual POIs one at a time? I understand that large scale mechanical edits over a large area are a bad idea and the admins hate people doing that (it is too easy to make mistakes, and there is bound to be something called "McDonalds" that is not actually a McDonald's fast food restaurant, and I don't really want to get into wars over how to tag things, but amenity=fast_food and name=McDonalds is just wrong). I think that applying the "mechanical edit policy" to semi-automated edits that are done one at a time is overkill though. However, there are a lot of these errors in OSM, so I really need help from other people to fix these errors. Also, it would be appreciated if validation rules for chain stores could be added to automated bug fixers such as maproulette, keepright, osmose, etc. _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
