[Tagging] Deprecation of crop=corn

[Minh Nguyen]

Vào lúc 13:28 2021-10-29, Mateusz Konieczny via Tagging đã viết:
> I think that in this case deprecation makes sense due to ambiguity and I 
> think
> that changing presets would make sense and be a good idea.

I don't know about JOSM, but iD doesn't actually have any presets for 
specific crops, only general presets for landuse=farmyard, 
landuse=vinyard, and man_made=silo that have a crop=* field. The field 
automatically suggests the most common values from taginfo; crop=corn 
shows up because it's more than 100 times more popular than crop=maize. 
I've proposed to label crop=maize as "Corn" [1], so that American 
English speakers can look at an existing occurrence of this tag and know 
what it means, but that change doesn't affect crop=corn one way or another.

Despite what the Oxford English Dictionary says, it's very unlikely that 
crop=corn has ever been tagged to mean a cereal crop in general, since 
crop=cereal is orders of magnitude more common for that purpose. It's 
ironic that the only common name in the main English-speaking, 
corn-producing regions is deprecated in favor of a name that's 
completely unknown in those regions -- even more obscure than 
"coriander" and "aubergine", I reckon -- but preferred in a region where 
maize isn't widely cultivated. Indeed, neither crop=corn nor crop=maize 
appears at all in the UK. [2]

Apparently maize is preferred in scientific, technical, and 
international development contexts. To me, that would be a stronger 
argument for maize than its colloquial usage in Britain. If not for 
that, I think this would be one of the clearer examples of where, for 
pragmatic reasons, OSM prefers British English spelling but not 
necessarily the nuances of British English vocabulary.

In any event, deprecating such a widely used tag would require more 
effort than unilaterally editing the infobox on the crop=corn page. All 
the pages that link to that page still promote its use for maize crops, 
rather than as a synonym for crop=cereal. Would the ambiguity between 
cereals and maize be problematic enough to warrant a mass retagging [3] 
and editor-based deprecation? Otherwise, crop=corn usage is only going 
to go up while crop=maize stays flat.

[1] https://github.com/openstreetmap/id-tagging-schema/pull/257
[2] http://taginfo.geofabrik.de/europe/great-britain/tags/crop=corn
[3] Also, https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/759964581 would be retagged 
maze=maize_maze, which has a certain ring to it.

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us