That’s an interesting point about those other disputed territories. I think it would be good to come up with clear guidelines about what constitutes de-facto control. I suspect that (as per OSM policy) those other disputed territories should be autonomus regions.

I’m mostly familiar with “designated” in the context of bike trails. Often these designations aren’t official because there’s no official body responsible for them. The wiki page does say “typically by a government” but I think this is a case where ground truth is more important.

Personally, I think lgbtq=designated is the best. Designated (at least in the access tags) doesn’t necessarily mean that it was designated by some official body, just that that is how the space is used in practice by people on the ground.

My main concern would be that LGBTQ is too broad of a designation (what if there are gay-specific bars, or trans-specific bar) but I don’t know much about the community to know if that’s realistically an issue.

for a small percentage of the population Google can just mean the Internet

“the internet” is a pretty vague source. Ideally, sources should be a lot more specific than that.

I find it suprising that sexual orientation and gender identity issues would be a thing. I mean, how would anyone know if you were a homosexual or a transgendered person. I guess I’m probably being a little naive, but it should be pretty easy to hide behind the pseudo anonymous nature of OSM.

I mean, this should be true to a degree about racist and sexist issues too, though I could see those things being accidentally/intentionally made public a lot easier.

Ultimately, spliting up a large body of water into smaller ploys is a violation of “One feature, one OSM element”. Historically, this principal has often be waved because the editors just were really quite bad at dealling with large ploys and multipolgons (hence “tagging for the editor”). However, the situation has improved a little bit, and as it improves, I expect the principal will be more closely adheared to.

Honestly I think falls into the same sort of category as tagging for the renderer. It’s a little different becaues large polys are actually a PITA to edit sometimes, so maybe it’s more accurate to call it “tagging for the editor” sometimes.

At any rate, whether a map wants to show small features at low zoom levels is entirely a question of map design. I don’t see why all those lakes should necessarily be mapped into a large multipolygon. With rivers, it makes sense to have one large multipolygo for the whole thing. But for a collection of small lakes, I don’t get it.

It seems really weird that anyone would find this difficult. You

1. create a poylgon
2. choose it’s class (tags) on the left
3. press “s”

The only time it doesn’t work is if you are trying to square something where the angles are too far off. I think the reason you have to do 2 before 3 is that typing “s” at phase 2 will filter the tag groups. Also, 2 is significantly more important than 3 (what good is a tagless rectangle?) so I think the ordering is fine.