Support for Key:lgbtq

[MTRNord]

General

Affected tag(s) to be modified/added: Key:lgbtq
Question asked: Is place XY LGBTQ+ friendly and/or Is place XY primary for LGBTQ+ people? and/or Is place XY only for LGBTQ+ people?

(It might make sense to combine them and have it as an option to choose from. Also note that the key itself also supports more than this. But I believe these are the most important ones and fit the StreetComplete style.)

Checklist

Checklist for quest suggestions (see guidelines):

• 🚧 To be added tag is established and has a useful purpose
• 🤔 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 quests have the same answer (No spam)
• 🕓 Applies to a reasonable number of map data (Worth the effort)

Ideas for implementation

Element selection:

This would be relevant mainly for companies and community centers (amenity=community_centre).

While community centers are simple to select, the companies half is actually a slight issue as it is quite a few things. The tag makes mainly sense in my opinion though for companies specifically doing services like styling (hair stylists, tattoo shops, dressing stores and similar.) as well as health care related buildings. This is due to the fact that here is a major exposure to possible judgment against LGBTQ people compared to other less direct things like a restaurant for example where the focus is on eating instead of choosing clothes or having a medical check of any kind where the service is close to a person.

Noteworthy is https://map.qiekub.org/ also choose to also include other things as well. However, I think these may lead to bloat in this case as there it is a fairly generic tag while on the above-mentioned ones there is a chance that LGBTQ people may get directly judged due to the things they are doing in those places. While yes, the judgment certainly also happens at other places, it is usually a less personal environment there. So I would argue that it makes sense in streetcomplete to only have a quest for the important places.

Metadata needed:
Not aware. This is a key that is per store/place (places, as for example communities)

Proposed UI:

[MTRNord]

Also note that I choose the 3 questions instead of trying to cover the full tag for a few reasons:

a) these are likely the most common things one can awnser
b) there are existing visualizings using this data
c) the key itself can be used more complex than this and likely is out of scope of streetcomplete.

[matkoniecz]

Easily answerable by everyone from the outside, but a survey is necessary

Are you sure? Because for most objects I would have no idea at all, especially from outside.

[MTRNord]

Easily answerable by everyone from the outside, but a survey is necessary

Are you sure? Because for most objects I would have no idea at all, especially from outside.

In our local area this has window stickers for places that actually support them. For things like community houses I guess this is indeed difficult. For stores we have window stickers here in a few places.

Similar to the ones shown in the wiki.

[matkoniecz]

In our local area this has window stickers for places that actually support them. For things like community houses I guess this is indeed difficult. For stores we have window stickers here in a few places.

what about ones that have no stickers? should all be tagged with lgtq=no? What about ones that have stickers but are not following up on promises?

(note, I am unfamiliar with topic but that seems an obvious problem to me)

[MTRNord]

In our local area this has window stickers for places that actually support them. For things like community houses I guess this is indeed difficult. For stores we have window stickers here in a few places.

what about ones that have no stickers? should all be tagged with lgtq=no?

The way I understand the wiki for the key is that no sticker would not result in lgbtq=no but instead would not have a tag until one of them is decided as a fact. I do see however that this may be problematic in StreetComplete 🤔

Also note that lgbtq=no means that something is actively against them. So it would mean they actively prevent people of that group from participating somewhere.

What about ones that have stickers but are not following up on promises?

Hm, I am not sure if that is a thing for StreetComplete to solve, as the key itself already faces this issue. I personally would say this is a society issue and not an Openstreetmap issue. As it would be advertising something that is not true. So while I do get that this is indeed causing bad data, I don't think you can do something about that. As even if you ask an employee, they likely would reply with what the sticker implies. While not keeping the promise would only be noticeable if you witness this. At which point you would then likely anyway have to fix the tag outside of streetcomplete, tag it as lgbtq=no and add a note on why that is. Arguably, I would even open a forum post on it discussing how to move forward there.

I think this would be better discussed on the wiki page, as this also affects the key itself and would be nice to be solved there instead of in an implementation of the key.

[kmpoppe]

what about ones that have no stickers? should all be tagged with lgtq=no?

The way I understand the wiki for the key is that no sticker would not result in lgbtq=no but instead would not have a tag until one of them is decided as a fact. I do see however that this may be problematic in StreetComplete 🤔

I would vouch for using lgtq:signed=no similar to opening_hours, yet that would have to be discussed and then agreed upon.

K

[westnordost]

While that data would be useful, the questions Is place XY primarily for LGBTQ+ people? and Is place XY only for LGBTQ+ people? ( lgbtq=only|primarily) do not satisfy the criteria for the quest guidelines due to the 💤 No spam rule. >99.9% of venues will not primarily or exclusively be for gay etc. people.
The same really applies for the remaining question Is place XY LGBTQ+ friendly? though less so as depending on the region/milieu your are in, there may be a decent number of different answers.

But additionally, the issue with a sticker on the shopfront door like this

(supposedly lgbtq=welcome) is that it is not about something concrete, i.e. neither about a prohibition (no smoking), an access restriction (only for...), type of place (primarily for...) nor about offering certain facilities, services or catering to certain needs (e.g. wheelchair=yes, diet:vegan=yes, diet:gluten_free=yes) or carry certain certification (organic=yes, diet:kosher=yes, ...).
(As written before in this thread, it can't be a promise to not discriminate based on gender, color, religion etc. because that would be illegal in many countries anyway, i.e. there'd be no information value.)
Instead, I see it as vague sign of support for that particular milieu. Especially in certain hotspots (de: Szeneviertel), I see many other stickers on the shop doors, most I frequently see are political activism - "Antifa", "no racism", "refugees welcome", "queer refugees welcome", "stand with 🇺🇦" etc.. Different stickers are acceptable in different times and milieus, so maybe in other places, one will see BLM stickers, MAGA stickers, Z stickers or whatever.

For reasons I do not want to explain here, I do think that recording the information to which milieu = political group / ethnicity / tribe / subculture / ... a business affiliates itself with is actively harmful and dangerous, so I will not support this.

The LGBTQ+ milieu is probably the least political and thus least controversial in most places but hence the information value of such a sticker is really low. And in places where it is controversial, see the paragraph above. The issue of the tag design of lgbtq=* is that e.g. Gay (only) bars use the same namespace as those "supports gay rights" (i.e. has a sticker on the door) places. The former information is valuable and I see that the neighbourhood in Hamburg that is known to be the meeting place for gays on map.qiekub.org is tagged appropriately while the latter would just drown this in irrelevant data (de: verwässern) in regions where being gay is not controversial and thus LGBTQ+ is the good / normal thing to approve.

[pkoby]

As the contributor of the images of the stickers on the wiki, I'll chime in.

There was some usage of lgbtq=welcome prior to my encountering the tag, but the wiki did not state objectivity. After some discussion with other parties, I added the photos as examples of verifiable information that would suggest that an establishment is friendly to the LGBTQ+ community. That said, I agree that the tag is inherently non-verifiable and could change at any time without notice. Additionally, an establishment (e.g. shop) could hire new staff who disagree with the sentiment, but that's not something that most places would ask about in the hiring process. Ergo, a place may be welcoming but the staff may not.

Thus, the tag lgbtq=welcome is sometimes difficult to prove and/or maintain. I considered a few months back about the possibility of a quest and came to the same conclusions: too many non-additions, spam-tagging of negatives, and low verifiability.

Also, map.qiekub.org seems dormant. It hasn't updated the dataset in months.

EDIT TO ADD: Google Maps has tags like this (Identifies as Women-owned, ...Black-owned, LGBTQ+ friendly), but these are self-tagged by establishments. The former are not tags in OSM (at least not widely-used). You could say they're a form of advertising, too.

[westnordost]

EDIT TO ADD: Google Maps has tags like this (Identifies as Women-owned, ...Black-owned, LGBTQ+ friendly), but these are self-tagged by establishments

And I think this is a big mistake. But then again, Google is driven by business interests and I guess they see it as enabling the business owner to put a virtual sticker on their shop door and don't see the potential social ramifications of this. I wrote that I don't want to get into explaining why this is bad, but just two examples/points:

• Google Maps could add a tag like Z so that businesses can express that they are patriotic and support their brave sons in battle, right? In fact, is there even a valid reason to not be supportive in a state of war? Everyone should have those labels! (For patriotic Russians reading this: Just swap Z with Ukraine flag to get my point)
• It's also quite convenient for white supremacists to know which shops are black-owned. In other places and times, such labels had to be enforced by the government. (I find the very notion to label a business as black-owned in hopes of advantages in business is racist)

[matkoniecz]

More general and also applicable here:

My vision is that StreetComplete should be designed in way so that any systematic/large scale issues and damage is caused only by users deliberately answering incorrectly. And small mistakes can happen with any editor.

And I am not expecting that this quest can be designed in way that avoid this (I was unsure initially, but it seems that it was clearly confirmed that this is too tricky to handle this in SC as a quest).