[Tagging] Deprecation of crop=corn

[stevea]

As another speaker of American English ("I reckon," too, though that phrase is not ESPECIALLY common in California) I'm OK with crop=maize AND crop=corn.  It's a bit like protect_class=24 (with boundary=protected_area) and boundary=aboriginal_lands:  they have the same semantic meaning.  "Fusing" the two isn't always a great idea.  If there is, however, a structured syntax scheme that looks to a more long-term harmony (like with boundary=protected_area and the eventual proposal to deprecate protect_class as numbers as values) then good discussion can ensue at how that best transitions into existence.  We do OK, not perfectly, but OK with these, they can (and do) take years.  I see no rush to deprecate crop=corn without comprehensive proposed structure the whole world can get behind that covers most-to-all cases.  Easier said than done, what OSM often does is "ascend a few more rungs on a ladder towards perfection" even as we may not actually achieve perfection.  I'm OK with that.

The tag crop=cereal can mean (in my mind) maize/corn, wheat, rice, sorghum, amaranth...the list goes on.  This tag is not a synonym for any particular crop, especially maize.  There are many fields of semolina wheat grown in Italy...rice is cultivated differently from one part of the world to another (sometimes terraced, sometimes shallow-water paddies...), yet it is still rice cultivation.  We could use fewer assumptions and simply better tagging of the specific crop.  Grain, or otherwise.  We do this with orchard (fruit trees, unspecified), vineyards (grapes, varietal unspecified), greenhouse_horticulture ("hothouses," specific crop(s) unspecified).  Tags like leaf_type have helped with landuse=forest, things like fruit=apples or grape=chardonnay or fruit=tomatoes or tubers=yams can't do anything but help.  And then we'll unravel those.  We're Linnaeus right now sketching taxonomic branches.  These do sort themselves out over time.  Via a combination of here, in the wiki, in other venues, among people who discuss, sometimes a proposal author gets involved...it's slow but it does work over time.

Do recall, the whole world "mapped in harmony" takes time to stitch together.  We're doing fine and while there is lots of room to improve, OSM really DOES improve.  We have thorny issues (forest, highway classifications at national levels...) they take their time to unravel and better organize syntactically.  We gain altitude.

"OSM prefers British English spelling but not necessarily the nuances of British English vocabulary."  PreCISEly.

In the case of crop=corn and crop=cereal the former is specific, the latter is general.  With "first-level general" tags (I use that loosely, but widely understood to mean "more top-level"), secondary tags help.

I applaud maze=maize_maze; thank you Minh.

SteveA