I finally cleared my mapping backlog including the past two London mapping party locations. I've just been adding POIs along Charing Cross Road. They'll be appearing shortly, but I have to say the area's already looking superbly POI'ed up.

As I was doing this I dived onto the wiki a few times to improve the shop tag documentation. I can see there's plenty more work to do on that. Each shop type should be documented with example photos and short sharp descriptions, followed by explanations of how to distinguish one type of shop from another. Although it's tedious wiki fiddling, it is important because no matter how obvious these things may seem, people can find ways of misunderstanding. Non-native english speakers don't always have a clear idea of what these english words mean, and also in other countries shops are different, so to nail down exactly what kind of shop we're actually talking about is important.

It's also important as a kind of land-grab exercise. If well established and well used tags don't get documented, then the ever churning mass of tag proposals and their wiki discussion/debates will spill over into areas of tagging for which mappers (the important people) already feel like they have tags established. Then of course we've set ourselves up for a big clash of opinions, which could easily have be avoided by a quick few sentences being added to the wiki. With this in mind, I've decided not to turn a blind eye each time I need a tag and can't find it on the wiki.

Speaking of finding things on the wiki... It just got a whole lot better. Firefishy installed lucene search for the wiki which on some keywords is a lot more effective than the basic old MySQL powered search. So go search out those tags!