surface for natural=beach

[HolgerJeromin]

General

Affected tag(s) to be modified/added: surface
Question asked: What is the surface of this beach?

Checklist

Checklist for quest suggestions (see guidelines):

• 🚧 To be added tag is established and has a useful purpose. Is rendered in default style.
• 🤔 Any answer the user can give must have an equivalent tagging (Quest should not reappear to other users when solved by one)
• 🐿️ Easily answerable by everyone from the outside but a survey is necessary
• 💤 Not an overwhelming percentage of elements have the same answer (No spam)
• 🕓 Applies to a reasonable number of elements (Worth the effort) only 20.73% are tagged

[matkoniecz]

What values one would expect for beach?

Page that you linked is not really useful in this case, https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/natural=beach#combinations gives surface=pebblestone and surface=sand

[HolgerJeromin]

Osm carto renders since gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto#1990 :

surface=sand is rendered with a fine grained pattern while surface=gravel|fine_gravel|pebbles|pebblestone|shingle|stones|shells is rendered with a coarser pattern

[westnordost]

Problem: It's rarely not a mix.

[matkoniecz]

@HolgerJeromin Implementing this quest should be fairly simple, but I have no idea how cases with nixed surface should be tagged.

Can you expand https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:natural%3Dbeach to better describe surface tagging? Especially in cases where multiple surface types are present on a single beach.

I see many possibilities how it should be handled.

• splitting beach into many areas/strips
• selecting just one surface
• selecting just one surface if it is dominating, otherwise specifying multiple surfaces
• selecting all surfaces that are significantly present and ignoring minorities

But unfortunately, I have no time for research of beach surfaces + research of current tagging situation + possible discussing of tagging + improving OSM wiki.

[andrewharvey]

@matkoniecz I wouldn't worry about dealing with all those possibilities, just let the user select "not a single consistent surface type" and let them add that as a note to the map with a description.