I haven’t been very active on OSM in the past weeks and months - other than work-related reasons this was mainly because of orienteering: competitions almost every weekend, and when I did map, I mapped for orienteering, mainly features that are of no interest to OSM (cf. last blog post).

One orienteering competition, though, caused an OSM edit. The venue was a typical German sports ground consisting of a football pitch, a running track around it, a pavilion building and not much else (no bleachers, no grandstand). Mapped in OSM was the outline of the racetrack, tagged leisure=stadium.

This inaccuracy is quite frequent (a few years ago refining sports grounds was my main pastime in OSM), partly because sports grounds in German villages are often aggrandizingly called “Stadion”.

About its fence: I have to admit that I was never really strict about One feature, one element. But the OOMapper, does not interpret, for instance, “leisure=pitch barrier=fence” as fence filled with open land, which made me realize that it would be clever to abide by the OFOE rule.

So it’s (in JOSM) Ctrl+C, Ctrl+Alt+V to duplicate the area, then tag the new way barrier=fence. Where the entrance is, there is a node which I tagged entrance=main and barrier=gate. In the German Telegram group it was suggested to maybe have entrance=main on leisure=sports_centre only and barrier=gate on barrier=fence only, which I think is somehow logical but I decided against it. Maybe I’ll change my mind after looking at more examples.

Oh, and one more tip for sports mappers: When there is a short track like for 100m or long jump only and you map it as an area, don’t forget to add area=yes, because otherwise it will be interpreted as a rectangular track along the outline of the actual track.

Happy mapping everybody!