[Tagging] Feature proposal - Voting - Water tap

[Pieren]

On Sun, Jan 11, 2015 at 11:58 AM, Kotya Karapetyan
<kotya.lists at gmail.com> wrote:

> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features/water_tap#Voting

I voted earlier today 'no' to this proposal in its current state and
provided my arguments. But now  I'm asked to forward them on this
mailing list (perhaps to see if I'm the only who disagrees).

My main concern with the proposal is its collision with the existing
"amenity=drinking_water" tag. And we get enough complains from
newcomers about our tagging complexity to not create more confusion.
The "amenity=drinking_water" tag is old and widely used (82.000 in
taginfo). But recently some people asked how to tag water resource
which is not intended for drinking like tap in cemeteries, see the
question referenced from the "help" site ([1]). I fully agree that we
need a solution here but it should not interfer with the existing tag
"amenity=drinking_water". I did not follow the whole discussion but
when I was called to provide my opinion on the proposal, the first
sentence in the wiki says "This is a proposal for tagging of (publicly
usable) water taps, such as those in the cities and graveyards. Water
taps may provide potable and technical water, which can then be
further specified with drinking_water=yes|no. " A bit later, there is
a warning about fire_hydrant but nothing explains here clearly where
is the difference between "man_made=water_tap"+"drinking_water=yes"
and "amenity=drinking_water". And nowhere it says if "drinking_water"
subtag is mandatory or not or what is the default value about
potability. And we have seen in the past that with such ambiguities, a
tag is very quickly improperly used by the community. Between the
lines and comments, we see that some people would deprecate the older
tag. Why not but then tell it clearly. What I don't like is what we
have seen in the past with some proposals deliberately ambiguous about
deprecating older tags because they know it is not very popular in the
votes, and enforced the deprecation later, when the tag is moved to
the "adopted" sections. I'm not personnally a big supporter of the
amenity=drinking_water but I think the current proposal is not clear
enough compared to the existing tags.

Pieren

[1] https://help.openstreetmap.org/questions/27869/how-to-tag-water-taps-not-intended-for-drinking-water