Proposal talk:Contractor

I think if we give a more specific meaning ("main building contractor") to a generic term ("contractor") this will set us up for problems in the future... The tag should be self-explanatory. How about building:main_contractor=* or building:construction:contractor=* ? --Csmale (talk) 21:28, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

Meaning

Is the contractor the estate owner or the company that does the construction work? --Fkv (talk) 21:37, 18 March 2018 (UTC)

In American English, "contractor" is the company that does the work. I'm not aware of any difference with British English here. --Carnildo (talk) 18:49, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

In British English, the "contractor" is the party who signs the contract, i.e. takes responsibility that the work gets done. They will probably use subcontractors to do much or all of the actual work.--Csmale (talk) 19:52, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

In that case, I guess that contractor=* is is only interesting during construction time (landuse=construction), because nobody cares about the construction company when the facility is finished.

At construction time, is contractor=* the same as operator=*? --Fkv (talk) 19:10, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Issues

• "Applies to Ways and Areas"

It should be also possible to apply this tag on nodes. There are a lot of man_made structures mapped this way.

• "Tag should contain only the original General Contractor who built the building."

General contractor has specific meaning[1] and it is usually not the entity which build the building/structure.

Maraf (talk) 19:30, 19 March 2018 (UTC)

Check against the tag developer

There needs to be a careful distinction between the contractor (firms hired to do the building work) and the developer( the firm which buys the land, designs the buildings and usually markets them at the end. Most usually the information one sees on a new building development is the name of the developer, not the contractor. In the past some firms did both "direct build", having a separate labour organisation of skilled building craft and trades people. There are two keys in use for this: developer=* and building:developer=*. Note that the name of the developer may persist as the name of the estate/subdivision long after it has been given an official name: "the Wimpey Estate", "the Sterling Homes Estate", "Hofton Estate" are all ones I can remember. I'll try & add a wiki page documenting these: I think developer is to be preferred for the same reasons advocated in the comments. SK53 (talk) 11:19, 20 March 2018 (UTC)