Change the preset for place=square to make it more placelike

[matkoniecz]

It affects pedestrian squares.

area=yes + highway=pedestrian is displayed as "Pedestrian Street".

iD allows to retag it to feature described as "square" with icon depicting walking human.

User may think that this is a correct edit.

Unfortunately it removes highway=pedestrian and replaces it with place=square.

Adding place=square is not incorrect but removing highway=pedestrian damages data.

[matkoniecz]

https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/262667394/history is an example where user confused by what iD displays repeatedly removes highway=pedestrian (situation is made worse by communication problems).

The same user thought that he found tagging mistake and repeated the same type of edit across entire country.

[matkoniecz]

And how it may be fixed:

• display area=yes + highway=pedestrian + place=square object as "pedestrian square" (so newbies making iD edit will not repeat damage to places already tagged place=square)
• display area=yes + highway=pedestrian as "pedestrian square" (so people will not be convinced that they fix data issue)
• display place=square without highway=* without human in the icon (so people will not think that place=square means pedestrian square)
• changing pedestrian area to place=square is not removing highway=pedestrian/footway but only adding place=square

[matkoniecz]

And as a quick fix: give place=square higher priority than area=yes + highway=pedestrian, so area=yes + highway=pedestrian + place=square objects will be displayed as "Square" rather than "Pedestrian Street".

[bhousel]

Hmm, can't routers just route pedestrian traffic across place=square?
It's not clear to me why iD should change anything. Both tags seem like basically the same thing to me.

[manfredbrandl]

There is a difference between highway=pedestrian and place=square according to the wiki:
A highway=pedestrian is a road or an area mainly or exclusively for pedestrians in which some vehicle traffic may be authorized ...
The place=square tag ... includes all objects on the square, including streets, pedestrian areas, green areas, buildings ...
So while walking on all of the area of highway=pedestrian is allowed, that is not the case for place=square, because it may include green areas and buildings on the place.

[matkoniecz]

Even if place=square was equivalent to highway=pedestrian + area=yes it would be still wrong to replace tagging scheme with widespread support by a new, with low support. For example it would break most data consumers rendering squares.

In addition place=square was invented to tag entire square, not only walkable part - so meaning is different. Simplest case where entire square is walkable would be tagged with both highway + area + optional place tags. More complex one would be tagged with place=square on geometry including entire square - what may include roads, vegetation etc.

[bhousel]

Ok, I've thought about the solutions

display area=yes + highway=pedestrian + place=square object as "pedestrian square" (so newbies making iD edit will not repeat damage to places already tagged place=square)

We could make this preset, but it wouldn't fix the issue of people changing the preset from one thing to another, and it would be not completely right if the place=square tag is supposed to encompass many things.

display area=yes + highway=pedestrian as "pedestrian square" (so people will not be convinced that they fix data issue)

That also seems not completely right, as area pedestrian highways are often not "squares".

display place=square without highway=* without human in the icon (so people will not think that place=square means pedestrian square)

☝️ this one is easy, so we can do it. Hopefully just removing the icon will help.

changing pedestrian area to place=square is not removing highway=pedestrian/footway but only adding place=square

I don't want to add special code to watch for changing one specific tag to another.. We don't have anything in iD like this currently.

[bhousel]

It would be great if the place=* tags were just point features for where people wanted their labels placed.

[Lee-Carre]

It would be great if the place=* tags were just point features for where people wanted their labels placed.

That would be mapping for the renderer.

Data should be semantic (thus, tagging the area itself as place=square). If that yields sub-optimal rendering, then it is the renderer which should change.

Some software is quite smart about when & how labels are shown (OsmAnd comes to mind).