[Tagging] Jewelry/jewellery shops

[Matthijs Melissen]

Hi all,

We currently use British English for almost all OSM tags. Jewellery
shops however are typically tagged with the American English variant
shop=jewelry (20083 occurrences), and hardly ever with the British
English variant shop=jewellery (187 occurrences). Editors and data
consumers only support the American variant.

Some mappers have proposed switching to the British English version.
I'm not sure if that's really is a good idea. It wouldn't be an easy
task, as it would require synchronisation between mappers, editors and
data consumers. The gain would be fairly minor and the disadvantages
rather large: all data consumers that handle jewellery shops would be
required to update their code. On the other hand, maybe it makes sense
to try anyway.

If we decide to accept the tag shop=jewellery and mark shop=jewelry as
discouraged, we should have at least a good plan. Without plan,
nothing will happen, as mappers don't want to use unsupported tags,
and data consumers don't want to support unused tags. Of course we
can't decide what editors/data consumers should do. However, we could
come up with a recommendation, and hope editors/data consumers are
willing to follow it. An example plan/procedure could look as follows:

Editors:
- The first 6 months after acceptance of the proposal to switch,
editors should keep producing the old tag shop=jewelry only. This
gives data consumers time to make arrangements to support the new tag.
- The following 3 months, editors might either produce shop=jewelry or
shop=jewellery.
- After 9 months from acceptance of the proposal, editors should only
produce shop=jewellery.

Data consumers:
- Within 6 months after the acceptance of the proposal, data consumers
should accept shop=jewellery in addition to shop=jewelry.
- When usage of shop=jewelry has declined sufficiently, data consumers
can stop supporting shop=jewelry. This is not expected within 12
months after acceptance of the proposal, and likely much later.

Data:
- The first 6 months after acceptance of the proposal, the data should
remain unchanged.
- After 6 months, the amount of shop=jewelry tags is expected to
decline in favour of shop=jewellery tags. It is hard to predict how
long this process will take.

Wiki:
- 6 months after the acceptance of the proposal, shop=jewellery should
be marked as recommended tag.
- 9 months after the acceptance of the proposal, shop=jewelry should
be marked as discouraged.

As you can see, this is not a simple proposal. There are also some
risks involved, for example because it is unclear whether data
consumers and editors would be willing to follow the recommendations.

All in all, it is a fairly large operation for a relatively small
improvement, and I'm not sure if it's worth it. I wonder though what
other mappers think. Would it make sense to switch the recommended tag
to shop=jewellery? And if we do so, would a plan similarly to the one
above make sense?

(Please note that I'm writing this on personal title and not as
maintainer of the openstreetmap-carto stylesheet.)

-- Matthijs