[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - catholic

[Minh Nguyen]

Vào lúc 14:55 2021-08-09, Greg Troxel đã viết:
> Also, it seems that Catholic is (in the outside-of-OSM world) considered
> an abbrevation/synonum for Roman Catholic, and I would not have thought
> it reasonable to refer to members of a Greek Orthodox church as
> Catholics.

This might depend on the region, for all I know. Where I've lived in the 
U.S., most Roman Catholics would consider a Ukrainian Greek Catholic 
church to be of a different denomination than a Roman Catholic church 
when listing churches by denomination. That may be out of ignorance, but 
it could also be due to a colloquial definition of "denomination" that 
isn't quite as strict as the one being proposed. Regardless, I think it 
highlights a problem with expecting mappers to make fine semantic 
distinctions that aren't usually verifiable on the ground.

The proposal draws a fine line between churches that are in full 
communion with Rome (denomination=catholic plus catholic=*) and those 
that are not. One of the churches in full communion is the Syro-Malabar 
Church. The church does not have "Catholic" in its name, but there's a 
temptation to call it denomination=syro-malabar_catholic just to 
accommodate data consumers that might incorrectly assume that every 
church in full communion is named "Catholic". On second thought, I 
probably should've tagged [1] as simply denomination=syro-malabar, to 
respect the denomination's actual name.

You could view this as an argument in favor of the catholic=* key, but I 
rather think of this as a good reason we should discourage everyone from 
inferring affiliations between organizations based on tag names alone. 
After all, I'm pretty sure most locals don't know [1] is Catholic, let 
alone a traveler passing through and mapping what they see.

Conversely, Traditional Catholic churches aren't in any communion with 
Rome but often thoroughly brand themselves as "Catholic churches", 
unqualified, in order to present the RCC hierarchy as apostate. There's 
even a "Roman Catholic" church [2][3] in my hometown that I passed by 
for decades and mapped several years before realizing, via a periodic 
notice in my local archdiocesan newspaper, that it's unaffiliated with 
the archdiocese.

Of course, neither the status quo nor the proposed catholic=* key would 
completely avoid such confusion, but I think we can anticipate more of 
it if mappers are expected to figure out these things on the spot. It's 
already difficult enough for some mappers to correctly distinguish 
between religion=scientology and religion=christian 
denomination=christ_scientist...

Maybe a shorter argument against the proposal is that we should be 
focusing on tagging aspects of the POIs themselves, not as much on the 
aspects of the organizations that they are affiliated with, which data 
consumers would hopefully glean from elsewhere. religion=* and 
denomination=* are by no means the ideal key names, but I don't see how 
adding catholic=* to the mix really adds clarity versus clearly 
documenting that denomination=* is a misnomer.

[1] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/809836490
[2] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/896778045
[3] https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/206064149/history

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us