[Tagging] RFC - Discourage railway=preserved

[Stefan Keller]

Sorry if I'm discouraging anybody. I'm open for almost any tagging
proposal as long as this namespace frenzy can be avoided.

Pls. read [1] about the drawbacks of this namespace frenzy: Its
detrimental for the OSM database! It's error prone, overloading tags,
making analysis unnecessary hard, etc. Don't move the value to the key
(as in railway:<VALUE>=yes) but keep a value where it belongs, like in
key=<VALUE>.

> "railway:preserved=yes" would work for everything, even if it is a monorail or whatever.

A strong indicator that this makes no sense is when the values are
always "yes" - or when "no" does'nt  make sense.

I'm not a railway specialist but you got me now and I investigated a
bit:  There's already gauge=* which is useful. Then there's this
railway=preserved
(https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/railway=preserved =>) 7795
which seems to be colliding but still a rather small number yet. What
is the goal to tag "preserved" anyway? Separate it from "in use"? In
fact there's: museum train, touristic train and model train, which
seem to differentiate much better.

So a proposal could go along the lines of

>> railway_train = museum | touristic | model | heritage | ... <<  or
>> railroad_type = museum | touristic | model | heritage |... <<

... but this is just a shiny attempt of mine to offer alternatives of
this problematic "*.*=yes" proposal.

~Stefan

[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Namespace#Over-namespacing_and_Prefix-fooling

Am Mo., 12. Apr. 2021 um 07:34 Uhr schrieb Rolf Eike Beer <eike at sf-mail.de>:
>
> Am Montag, 12. April 2021, 01:06:07 CEST schrieb Martin Koppenhoefer:
> > sent from a phone
> >
> > > On 12 Apr 2021, at 00:45, Mateusz Konieczny via Tagging
> > > <tagging at openstreetmap.org> wrote:
> > >
> > > tags used  > 46 000 times
> > > ( https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/railway=narrow_gauge )
> > > and > 2 186 000 times
> > > ( https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/railway=rail )
> >
> > sorry Mateusz, but 2 million railway=rail are not a point for keeping
> > railway=narrow_gauge, the latter could be tagged with rail as well (maybe
> > some are?)
>
> narrow_gauge is in relation to what is the standard width of that country. So
> a highspeed line from from France to Spain must change it's tagging at the
> border from railway=rail (north) to railway=narrow_gauge (south) because the
> regular gauge in Spain is 1668mm in contrast to the 1435mm used in remaining
> Europe. I guess most of them are still tagged "rail".
>
> But this is a totally different discussion. "railway:preserved=yes" would work
> for everything, even if it is a monorail or whatever.
>
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