Recently, I came across some villages in Bolivia which have “aldea” for a name. Upon closer inspection, I discovered there were over 600 in the country. The size of the problem is easy to find with Overpass Turbo. Just tell the wizard to search for name=”aldea” and it will do everything you want. Thanks to the Argentine twitter feed, I knew that you can search for this in a whole country, as opposed to within a bounding box. Here’s what the output looks like. I left some cases as a reference.

Obviously, the name tag is not for the description. These ‘aldeas’ were already properly classified as hamlet, village, etc, so there was no information in there. These were untouched nodes without a history. After brief consultation with the Bolivian community, I decided to go ahead.

Now, as a Potlach 2 mapper, I didn’t know how to fix this in JOSM. I’ve opened JOSM maybe five times, and every time I shut the thing down after 15 minutes. I know.

I read some use cases for Level0 before, and this seemed to be one. It was much easier than I thought. After running the query, you can hit the “Export” button and choose Level0. This opens the Level0 editor. You still have to log in and allow the editor to access your account. Apart from that, I just copied the text to Notepad++ and did a Find and Replace for “name = aldea” to “fixme = needs a name”. Hit save, and you just fixed 500 villages (max 500 objects per edit!).

Now I know, you shouldn’t just mass edit these things and walk away. So I though why not create a Maproulette task to check these villages - maybe some of them had a duplicate node around with the name. After reading the simple guide to creating a Maproulette task, I changed my mind. But I did remember seeing a guide to taskfixing in Potlach. So I made a new query for the fixed villages. Didn’t work when trying to load as a GPX, but worked a charm when I exported the query to GeoJSON format.

I already knew Overpass Turbo was a killer machine. I knew the beautiful maps you can build around these queries, like making an up to date map of the Belgian breweries in OSM. And now the combination with Level0 is another tool to turn people turned off by JOSM into power users.

And I didn’t even need Help this time.

EDIT: I did get ahead of myself a bit: you really shouldn’t do this before talking to the people who mapped these things. I’ll do that now - it is an easy revert if in fact there is some very good reason for abusing the name tag on this scale.