Why are mappers using landuse=village_green in the wrong way?

More than once in the past few years have I started and participated in various topics on the tagginglist (as well as on the local Dutch forum) where the precise use of the landuse=village_green was discussed.
A Village Green is a situation that is described in the wiki, and I quote:

“… is a distinctive part of a village centre. It’s an area of common land, usually grass but often including flowers, shrubs, small trees and a pond, located in the centre of a village (quintessentially English - defined separately from ‘common land’ under the Commons Registration Act 1965 and the Commons Act 2006).”

The proposal (in 2006) and the final voting (two in favor and none against!) never reached a wide audience (which back in 2006 of course was much smaller than nowadays) so nobody outside the UK really knew or understood its meaning and specific use.

The following text is partly copied from my posting on the tagging list:

Because I found out that the tag is greatly misused, I did an extended research to get more details about its current use.
My research is based on the OSM dataset of 14 july 2019.

The total number of tags for landuse=village_green is: 91645
I then took a selection of 22 countries (see table at end) and compared the uses per country to its use in the UK, because that country seems to be the main reason for the existence of this tag.
In those 22 countries the tag is used 55721 times and there are 5569 unique mappers responsible for using it.
I was surprised to see that in the country where I live, the Netherlands, the tag was used 260% more than in the UK!
Given the original definition you could expect that in the Netherlands (based on the number of cities/towns/villages and assuming that each of those indeed had a Village Green - which isn’t true) there could be at most 2440 Village Greens, not the 5131 we have now. Where, then, are the 2691 others located??

… See full entry

What shall we have for diner tonight?

### Improving the OSM map - why don’t we (14)

Some thoughts on restaurant and food-tagging on OSM.

A restaurant is considered an amenity and tagged with amenity=restaurant.
One would expect that in order to show what type of restaurant this is, or what food you can eat there, the next step would be:
restaurant=italian
restaurant=fish
restaurant=burger
After all, this is accepted:
natural=water
water=lake
But, alas, OSM is differently and so a new tagging was introduced to indicate what we can eat in a restaurant. No, they didn’t choose: food=* , but came up with:
cuisine=*
So, the correct tagging for a restaurant and what is served inside is:
amenity=restaurant
cuisine=italian
This is not so bad at all, because this scheme allows you to tag many more places where you can eat, but which are not considered a restaurant, like a cafe, bar or pub (or a railway station or book shop).
There are some curious constructions however, because to tag a Burger King (or any other fast food restaurant) you can do so in two ways:
amenity=restaurant
cuisine=burger
or:
amenity=fast_food
cuisine=burger
By itself, using fast_food as a value for an amenity is rather strange, because to me, fast food is a type of food, belonging to cuisine, not an amenity! (Would you use highway=asphalt? No, of course not, because highway=** expects a function of the highway it describes, not its surface).
The addition of the cuisine= in the last case is maybe not even necessary, as hamburgers are core business in any fast food restaurant.
Over the years the list of values to assign to the cuisine key has grown (and will keep to do so) and now (february 2017) we have two basic groups in the wiki:

• 40 values for the type of food (like fish, meat, pizza, burger, kebab, soup, etc.)
• 53 values for the ethnicity of the food (like italian, greek, chinese, mexican, etc.)

… See full entry

The fixme=* tag is often used to give other mappers an indication that something needs more research (or it is a “note to self”) .
All too often it stays at that point and no one ever cares any more about such a request for improvement. I found out that roughly more than half of the fixme’s is at least 2 years old.

I wrote a simple overpass query with some stylesheets attached which shows the text of the fixme immediately on the map.
Click on the link above, locate the map to your neighbourhood and hit the run button.
Is there something you can fix? Please do so and remove the “fixme”

For the centre of London, this is the result:
(this screenshot is from 2016, most likely it is different when you look it up now!)

The overpass query searches for nodes with a fixme=, but you can easily change it to finding ways instead.
And if you want to locate all note= tagging, simply replace “fixme” with “note” in the script.