Talk:Tag:office=surveyor

Pollsters

This article defined office=surveyor as "An office of a person doing surveys, this can be risk and damage evaluations of properties and equipment, opinion surveys or statistics." I just removed any reference to opinion surveys and statistics.

While it's true that opinion surveys are a kind of survey, the English term for a person who conducts an opinion survey is a "pollster", not a "surveyor". One cannot simply add -er or -or to any English term to derive an occupation. It makes little sense to conflate the two unrelated occupations in the same tag value; no data consumer would be able to impart any semantic meaning from the tag. iD also interprets the tag to refer to technical surveys, both in its choice of a vest icon and in various preset translations.

The problematic definition came from the original article revision from 2012, which pointed out that the tag was already used a mere eight times by then. Nowadays, the tag is used 595 times, so however it was used back then is irrelevant. Spot-checking the occurrences by name, I was able to find one likely pollster, but the vast majority appear to be related to land surveying or other kinds of technical surveys. Given the relatively weak justification for documenting the tag at the time, I don't think there's any harm in now aligning the document to actual usage and common sense.

 – Minh Nguyễn ^💬 21:43, 30 April 2021 (UTC)