There’s some discussion here about converting tags to be more easily used by third party tools, or if something is counts as a real cuisine. I see these as separate cleanup tasks, so here are some thoughts I have about that:

There’s obviously so much that could be improved about cuisine mapping generally. First of all, only 45% of restaurants even have cuisine information. Then a lot of the tags that do exist are imprecise, or list everything on the menu, or are missing critical information, or outdated, or very similar to other tags, or on non-restaurant POIs, or the restaurant has closed, or any number of other issues. I know it’s tempting to try fix everything you see when you do this, but I urge you to exercise restraint.

This process is designed to find and fix spelling mistakes. That’s all. You might see and want to fix other issues, and it might be possible to do it, but you will probably be missing a lot of critical context, and you certainly won’t find all the instances of that issue because the search wasn’t designed for it.

That’s not to say I didn’t do any other changes as part of my big Canada changeset. I marked some restaurants as closed, researched the difference between gelato and gelati, added a couple website tags, and more. But those all take a lot of time and are tangential to the main project of just fixing spelling mistakes.

Here are some examples of other cuisine cleanup projects that could be done, but not all of them should be. Think very carefully before doing any of them because they might violate the automated edits code of conduct.

• Add cuisine information to restaurants that don’t have it
• Review cuisines on non restaurant/fast_food/cafe POIs
• Shorten cuisine lists with more than five entries
• Reorder lists to put ethnicity first and food second
• Give all branches of a chain restaurant the same cuisine
• Convert all cuisine=beer tags to drink:beer=yes
• Add the tag cuisine=pho to any Vietnamese restaurant with “Pho” in its name
• Decide Canadian cuisine is fake and then delete all cuisine=canadian tags

The point is that all of these are better done as separate projects. And also they are easier to do if the spelling mistakes are cleaned up first.

@watmildon I’m glad to hear you were able to do this for your area.

pho and gelato were terms I saw a lot too, but when I redid the wiki I had to take a global perspective and make decisions based on data, not my personal experiences. Turns out the tags just aren’t used very much, only 70 or 80 times total. When I’m mapping my area I would definitely use them, and when I’m looking for places to get pho in my city I would definitely appreciate having them there. But this process was more about cleaning up the tags that other people had already put.

By the way, I peeked at your changeset and there were a couple of changes I disagree with. Mostly on deleting tags. There’s no reason to change burger;fries to burger, or vietnamese;pho to pho unless you know the places really don’t serve fries or Vietnamese food, and there’s no need to delete bundt_cakes from a place that clearly serves bundt cakes even though it’s the only use of that tag. I would always tend to leave information there unless it’s actually causing issues.

My biggest concern is the change of a tag seafood to fish. Those mean different things, and looking at the restaurant’s website, it looks like they serve more oysters and clams than they do fish. Since this is cleanup work mostly focused on fixing spelling mistakes, you should avoid making changes that affect the meaning unless you can verify that the previous tag was actually incorrect.

I’m not really sure what Canadian cuisine means, but cuisine=canadian is sometimes used on places serving specifically Canadian or local foods like maple or poutine or donair or seafood, and sometimes it’s used on what otherwise might be called American food. It’s also possible some mappers used it where they probably shouldn’t. (“I’ll map this as cusine=chinese;canadian because it’s a Chinese restaurant… in Canada!”). Anyway the tag is not used much, probably because it doesn’t mean anything specific. I’ve never heard anyone actually say “Let’s get Canadian food tonight.”

I confirmed the greek pizza tags by looking at the restaurant’s web site. I included that example specifically to compare against the french tacos case, to show that it cannot be an entirely mechanical process, and that sometimes it takes research or knowledge of foods.