There’s a saying in a certain article on the OpenStreetMap wiki that “tagging for the renderer” is equivalent to “lying to the renderer.”

Not only that, but the article also restricts the definition and meaning of “tagging for the renderer” as “the bad practice of using incorrect tags for a map feature so that they show up in the mapper’s renderer of choice. Such tagging goes against the basic good practice principles.”

I think that “tagging for the renderer” as a term should first be treated as neutral. On its own, there is no implication that “tagging for the renderer” forces us to lie to the system. Sometimes, people want to do tagging for the renderer simply because they want to place cool symbols around their area in OSM Carto.

Take me, for example.

Several months ago, I decided to download the entire openstreetmap-carto GitHub repository to analyze all of the (cool) icons contained within it and determine which tag combinations were needed to summon such icons on the OSM default map tile.

I found that the charging station icon was really cool. I loved its light blue color scheme, and its visibility on the map tile was quite good—it was already displayed at zoom level 17, on par with bank, gallery, and embassy icons.

I wanted to place this icon around my neighborhood soon. But alas, I didn’t know where any charging stations were located. So I shelved this idea for weeks and months.

Then, during a work trip to Bandung, while walking past the campus I attended as a student several years ago, I finally saw one. A charging station in the wild! It was stationed right in front of the parking area of the Labtek V building.

I was so elated—it felt like finding a legendary Pokémon in the wild! At that moment, I immediately stopped walking, opened Vespucci, and mapped the charging station.

Vespucci is nice and easy to use. Its GPS feature allows us to immediately zoom in to the current map location. Then, I simply clicked the up-and-down icon on the bottom sidebar to download the OSM data for the area, added a new node, searched for the tag preset (typing “charging” was enough to summon amenity=charging_station—no need to memorize the tag scheme at all), and it was done.

That was my first charging station mapping, purely motivated by “tagging for the renderer,” because I thought its Carto icon was really cool.

Weeks after that, I found more and more charging stations in the wild while on work trips—

• In the parking area of Metropolitan Mall Bekasi while waiting for a Biskita bus.
• In a certain building near the Ministry of State-Owned Enterprises office, while walking from Gondangdia Station to the National Library.
• In a certain building across the road near the U.S. Embassy and Consulates in Indonesia, also while walking from Gondangdia Station to the National Library.

All of them were fueled by my strong motivation to “tag for the renderer.”