Talk:Tag:building=allotment house

Why not use hut? It pretty much fits the description, no? A simple and crude shelter, not only for storing tools. --Westnordost (talk) 18:49, 30 May 2018 (UTC)

Maybe I am confused by English here, but "hut" to me suggests something in old/traditional/outdated building style. And some allotment houses are plastic/modern boxes, sometimes quite expensive or high quality and hut does not fit them. Some are also what can be described as "supershed" but maybe building=shed would be better for them Mateusz Konieczny (talk)

Outbuilding

re https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Tag:building%3Dallotment_house&curid=148182&diff=2183178&oldid=2094928 (@Minh Nguyen:) see https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ffcm&q=outbuilding&ia=definition - seems that main nearby house is required, while this building can be a standalone, far away from any main building. Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 07:53, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

@Mateusz Konieczny: Thanks, that's good to know. Westnordost and I had a good chat about this page on OSMUS Slack the other day. We were struggling to come up with a reliable way to describe this tag for an English audience. For Americans, this is a foreign concept on a couple different levels. "Outbuilding" was meant to give a sense of the size and importance of the building. In context, I think people are unlikely to read into it to mean that there has to be a larger building nearby, the same way no one would take building=chapel to mean it has to be attached to a building=church, but I may be wrong. "Cabin" and "cottage" were also suggested, but I think they're too likely to be misinterpreted as permanent residences. ("Shack" would imply a ramshackle appearance, which I don't think is meant here, and a "shed" would be too small for anyone to spend quality time inside.) But if you think "outbuilding" is too confusing, we can change it to just "building" and leave it to the rest of the definition to clarify its size and importance. – Minh Nguyễn ^💬 17:24, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

"minor building"? For me source of confusion is that I though that "outbuilding"/"outhouse" is for toilet located externally from a house (often a latrine), and checked the definition that still seemed to be conflict. But I am definitely NOT an English language expert :) Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 18:13, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

that's outhouse. You can also refer to google image search and compare the two --Westnordost (talk) 18:34, 8 August 2021 (UTC)

Oh yeah, definitely not an outhouse; that's quite different, despite shared etymology. (English is such a tricky language!) Minor building could work for this article and avoid confusion with toilets for non-native speakers. It wouldn't be as catchy for a preset name, which is I think the context we had originally been discussing on Slack. – Minh Nguyễn ^💬 23:34, 9 August 2021 (UTC)

Heh, it gets better: "In some localities and varieties of English, particularly outside North America, the term "outhouse" refers not to a toilet, but to outbuildings in a general sense: sheds, barns, workshops, etc. " [1] And I looked into it more and outbuilding == toilet seems personal confusion (I found some sources like https://www.powerthesaurus.org/outbuilding+toilet_stall but all of very low quality - likely automatically generated without a review) Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 06:38, 10 August 2021 (UTC)

I had no idea outhouse can mean something else! I'm glad we didn't end up with an established building=outhouse tag to cause confusion. :^D – Minh Nguyễn ^💬 22:01, 10 August 2021 (UTC)