[xp84]

I tried items with rare values for 'surface.' I found and fixed a footpath through a pasture (the docs seemed to imply that "dirt" is sufficient for a path through a pasture). But my next item was in China and the surface was "木" which apparently means Wood. But the rest of the fields of this pier were also in Chinese, and I was too shy to update it. I hope that localization is handled separately and that it would have been fine, but... it would be super annoying if a Chinese-speaking editor updated an American map to have details all in Chinese. Googling "are tags on openstreetmap supposed to always be in English?" gave no hints.

[morsch]

The tags are specified in the wiki: https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:surface

In this case, the spec allows for "commonly used" user defined values, which is unusual (how does a user defined value become commonly used enough in the first place?), measured per this site: https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/surface#values

You can find a few non English entries in there, but the vast majority and all of the most common ones are in English. "木“ has 2 entries, "wood" has >200k. I think it's pretty clear that even in cases when the specification is open, the intention is for values to be English whenever practical.

The alternative is so outrageous that they made it into an April fools joke: https://weeklyosm.eu/osm-tags-soon-in-german-and-french-and-...

Here's someone attempting to translate the tags/values (for display): https://github.com/osmlab/osm-planning/issues/20

[Freak_NL]

You misinterpreted the wiki page. That tag (like several others) explicitly supports user-defined values. This is useful, because you cannot define a complete set of values for something as open-ended as a way's surface. Innovations happen, and sometimes odd things are used to pave a way for a variety of reasons (art, tourist appeal, experiments, etc.)

So that table there lists all common values covering 99% of the use cases, and finally links to TagInfo for all values in use. That 'all commonly used values' bit is slightly misleading, because TagInfo lists all uncommon values, but it true in the sense that any common value missing from that table will be listed in TagInfo (being derived from the actual database).

[Freak_NL]

OpenStreetMap generally follows the guideline that all tags and generic values (i.e., not names and other language dependant stuff) are written in British English. Exceptions exist due to the way this project works. The wiki is the primary place to go for documentation of tags and values.

So yes, surface=木 is wrong, but to replace it you would have to know if the path uses wood-chips (`woodchip`) or boards (`wood`).