Proposal: Surface=Laterite
The proposal for tagging surface=laterite aims to document a specific type of tropical road soil. This soil, characterized by its red/orange color and unique properties, is currently misclassified under broader categories. The proposal seeks to clarify the distinction between laterite and clay soils to improve mapping accuracy in tropical regions.
- ▪Surface=laterite is proposed to document a cohesive, iron-oxide-rich soil found in tropical and subtropical regions.
- ▪The proposal addresses the confusion between laterite and clay, highlighting their different physical properties.
- ▪Community support for the proposal includes confirmations from 39 mappers with relevant regional experience.
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Record
| Original publisher | Openstreetmap |
| Canonical URL | https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposal:Surface%3Dlaterite |
| Publication time | Wed, 20 May 2026 08:58:32 +0000 |
| Retrieval time | 2026-05-20T09:05:01.211Z |
| Last seen | 2026-05-20T09:05:01.211Z |
| Headline source | Publisher (no WeSearch rewrite) |
| Excerpt source | publisher body |
| Excerpt method | First ~120 words (~800 chars) of extracted publisher body, fair-use limited. |
| Summary | WeSearch · cerebras-chat (WeSearch summarizer) |
| Summary source text | contentText |
| Citation coverage | Summary is a WeSearch-generated derivative; primary citation is the original publisher URL. |
| Cluster | nsVpoKuG5BwH |
| Cluster logic | Grouped by semantic title/content similarity across sources within a rolling window. Same-publisher template collisions are excluded from coverage comparison. |
| Ranking reason | Story pages are not engagement-ranked. Hub feeds use recency, with optional source-diversified chronological ordering (cap consecutive stories per source). No personalized ranking. |
| Publisher visit | Yes — open original |
| Substitutes article? | No — link-out required for full text |
Rights status (four layers)
WeSearch handling by dimension
| Indexing | May the item be indexed (stored, ranked, made findable)? | Allowed |
| Snippet | May a short excerpt of the publisher's text be shown? | Allowed |
| AI summary | May WeSearch generate its own short summary of the article? | Limited |
| Retrieval / RAG | May the content be exposed for third-party retrieval-augmented generation? | Not asserted |
| Model training | May the content be used to train AI models? | Not asserted |
| Commercial reuse | May the content be reused commercially? | Not permitted |
Basis: Derived from the published RSS/Atom feed. Contact: [email protected]. Reviewed: 2026-07-24.
Opening excerpt (first ~120 words) tap to expand
surface=laterite Proposal status: Proposed (under way) Proposed by: Julcnx Tagging: surface=laterite Data item Applies to: way Definition: A road, track, or path surfaced with lateritic soil: a cohesive, usually red/orange, iron-oxide-rich tropical/subtropical soil that hardens when dry but rapidly becomes slippery and potentially impassable on first wetting, then deeply plastic and adhesive under sustained rain. This proposal also includes a conditional documentation update to Tag:surface=clay to distinguish laterite from clay-mineral soils. Draft started: 2026-04-21 RFC start: 2026-05-19 Want to see the result without reading the full proposal? Jump to how the page would look like after approval.
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Excerpt limited to ~120 words for fair-use compliance. The full article is at Openstreetmap.
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