[Tagging] Residential gardens: deprecate leisure=garden, suggest alternative

[Andrew Chadwick (lists)]

I'm suggesting that we remove the language on
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:leisure%3Dgarden which recommends
leisure=garden for tagging private residential gardens. The talk page
entry is at http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Tag:leisure%3Dgarden
and I welcome your comments!

This mini-proposal suggests A) removing the language from the first and
second English-language paragraph describing residential gardens, and B)
suggesting

    landuse=residential
    residential=garden

as an alternative tagging scheme. My rationale for doing this:

1. Supporting A) Residential gardens are of little interest for the
general map data consumer's leisure activities. Therefore they should
not be tagged using the leisure=* namespace for reasons of backwards
compatibility (see 3 below), consistent rendering (see 3 also), and
descriptive soundness (see 2 and 4).

2. Supporting B) They are however a form of land use, so the landuse=*
tag seems appropriate. Specifically, they're a kind of residential
landuse, so it makes sense to refine a use of landuse=residential. So
the combination in B) seems appropriate.

3. Supporting A and B) Use of leisure=garden means that renderers cannot
distinguish between private residential gardens and public or
fee-private leisure space gardens without deploying extra rules. It
would be more sensible and backwards compatible to do something else,
particularly since trac ticket 3302 doesn't show any signs of being
closed any time soon. Rendering residential gardens in the same colours
as surrounding residential landuse that -isn't- gardens both looks
prettier when the renderer doesn't do anything special to support
residential gardens, and makes for a more consistent-looking map (since
many users don't care two hoots about tagging residential gardens, but
their neighbours do).

4. Supporting B) The drill-down pattern used here adds an additional
layer of meaning to areas of residential landuse. What I've been calling
"iterative refinement" to date.

5. Supporting B, but full disclosure...) There are 756 uses of
residential=garden in the wiki at present,
http://taginfo.openstreetmap.de/tags/residential=garden , but I've added
possibly the majority of those myself by changing a great many local
objects using the erroneous tagging scheme to the scheme I want. There
may have been ~100 uses before, which is why I'm listing it near-last.

6. Supporting A and partly B) General sanity-check nod on #osm. See the
Talk:Tag:leisure=garden page in the wiki.

-- 
Andrew Chadwick