[Tagging] Why should we avoid overusage of amenity=* tag?

[Joseph Eisenberg]

In villages and neighborhoods of smaller towns, the school is often
the largest or only public place.

In Central and South America, the public school is also often the
place where voting takes place for elections, community meetings
happen, and cultural events take place. This is also true of many
rural settlements in North America which lack any other secular
meeting place. In my rural American home town the public school
building was the only place to hold an indoor community event.

I suspect that in many rural areas the school is one of the most
likely places to meet with someone outside of the home or workplace,
because there are no other "third places" such as cafes, restaurants,
libraries, etc.

On 4/21/19, Paul Allen <pla16021 at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Sat, 20 Apr 2019 at 19:52, 石野貴之 <yumean1119 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>>
>> I don't know the reason why we should not use amenity=* too much. If you
>> have time, please let me know.
>>
>> Lack of specificity.  It's nice to be able to categorize things.
> Otherwise every physical tag would be
> natural=* (if beaver damns are natural because beavers are natural, then
> all man_made=* is natural
> because man is natural) and every functional tag would be amenity=*.  There
> has, in the past, been
> a tendency to treat amenity=* as misc=* and some of us are trying to limit
> such usage.
>
> There is also a feeling that"amenity" is more suitable for places offering
> leisure activities and
> for actual amenities (such as post boxes) rather than schools.  Very few
> people decide to go on
> holiday to a school, or feel a need to visit a school to do something.
> Schools, like offices, are places
> most of us would prefer not to be and only go there because we're compelled
> or paid to do so.
>
> --
> Paul
>