Boot scrapers have fascinated me since Helge Schneider’s musical “Mendy das Wusical” in which they play a very important role. #stiefelabstreifkante (It’s a somewhat absurd musical by my favourite German comedian…)

I remember that when I moved to Ireland I kept sending my sister pictures of the ones I came across, because she also likes the musical and the comedian.

For some years now I have been thinking that it would be interesting to map them. Partly because I wanted to know how many there are in Kilkenny and where and also, you never know who might be interested in this data in the future, so OpenStreetMap is the obvious choice to record them.

A.-K. D., CC BY-SA 4.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

At this point, if you get tired of reading - I’ve made a video about it: watch video on YouTube

I didn’t want to map them as nodes by themselves, because I didn’t want to clutter the map with nodes that are of very little interest to most people, and because it happens too easily that you move a node by mistake when moving the map in iD. So instead, I decided to add a key boot_scraper to the entrance key. This had the productive side effect that I had to map (most of) the entrances first. Some had already been mapped. I decided to follow a similar pattern to the sidewalk key to say whether there was a boot scraper left or right of the entrance or on both sides. If you’re really mad into recording them, you could also use was:boot_scraper where you can see traces of them on the steps, but I’m not planning on doing that all the time.

A.-K. D., CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons

According to the situation in Kilkenny, boot scrapers are found outside Georgian buildings which means you could also add building:architecture=georgian, if you wanted to be thorough.

I noticed after a few entrances that many of them had a step where you enter through the door, so I decided to add a step_count to the entrance as well. Many Georgian houses also have more steps outside (I don’t know if that’s because they were paranoid about floods or if they wanted the option of having windows in their basements and needed an elevated ground floor). So I made a point to map these as well to help mapping accessibility.

(See also my previous diary post about steps in the housename:etymology.)

I have not documented the key on the wiki, because I don’t want to document something I’m the only user of - not too often anyway- , so as soon as someone else uses it, I will. ;-)