[Tagging] Deprecating school=entrance in favour of entrance=yes

[Minh Nguyen]

Vào lúc 17:39 2022-06-09, Pieter Vander Vennet đã viết:
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm trying to get my head around tagging schools and I'm at the same 
> time documenting tags that are used and attempting to improve the wiki 
> pages. I did document my current understanding on tagging schools here 
> <https://www.openstreetmap.org/user/Pieter%20Vander%20Vennet/diary/399339>.
> 
> However, I did encounter the tagging `school=entrance` which has been 
> used about ~2000 times to indicate a school entrance. This tagging has 
> been supplanted by `entrance=*`, which has cleaner semantics, is more 
> flexible and is widely understood and supported by both mappers, editors 
> and data consumers. School=entrance has beennoted in the wiki for years 
> <https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Key:school#School_entrances> as 
> being faulty too. At last, the `school`-key might be useful in the near 
> future for actual tagging of the type of the school (but that is a 
> discussion for another itme).

Thanks for broaching this topic. This homonymous key [1] has been a 
matter of frustration for some mappers for a long time. [2]

> And I would like to have the various editors out there (JOSM and iD) to 
> start giving deprecation warnings too, but that should be discussed on 
> this mailing list here too (as requested by the JOSM-team 
> <https://josm.openstreetmap.de/ticket/22120>).
> 
> So:
> 
> - What are your thoughts on deprecating school=entrance in favour of 
> entrance=main, entrance=yes or something similar?

Not every school=entrance represents a main entrance to a school, so 
entrance=yes would be a safer replacement to document. Of course, 
mappers should feel free to refine it further to entrance=main as 
applicable.

Your idea to deprecate school=entrance has a lot going for it. It is 
fully subsumed by the entrance=* tagging scheme, which in 2011 became 
probably one of the most recent primary feature keys to be approved. 
Usage of school=entrance leveled off in 2014 and today is primarily 
concentrated in Europe (unlike school entrances in reality). To my 
knowledge, it has no software support whatsoever, whereas entrance=* 
enjoys widespread support in both editors and data consumers. Much more 
common tags have been deprecated in the past.

> - How does deprecation work? Is there a voting process?

It is possible to use the proposal process [3] to deprecate a tag. This 
involves a fair amount of work, and people sometimes come out of the 
woodwork to oppose even common-sense deprecation proposals. [4] If 
deprecating an uncommon tag would be uncontroversial, an alternative 
would be to unilaterally document it as an "possible synonyms" in a big 
red box. [5] But that approach should only be used when there's not much 
to discuss, and editor developers may wait to see if the deprecation 
sticks before acting on it.

[1] 
<https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Homonymous_keys#Refining_the_feature_versus_something_tangential_to_it>
[2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Special:Diff/1610243
[3] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposal_process
[4] https://xkcd.com/1172/
[5] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Template:PossibleSynonym

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us