[Tagging] RFC: Deprecating leisure=summer_camp in favour of tourism=camp_site

[stevea]

On Mar 19, 2022, at 12:23 PM, Zeke Farwell <ezekielf at gmail.com> wrote:
> ...These are not places for the general public to stay, so it doesn't seem to me that displaying them  on OpenCampingMap would make sense.

I'm in agreement with a great deal here, but I would like to point out (hello Zeke; I'm a big fan of yours) that simply because things aren't open to the general public, we shouldn't map them.  Plenty of such things exist (military reservations, strictly-controlled natural reserves that are closed to human disturbance, prisons that do not allow visitors...) and we map them, and some renderers display them.  For example, I might want to know the extent of the summer camp where I send my daughter, so I can see that it has separate camps for boys and girls, that her cabin is very close to the first aid station, that not only is there a ropes course, but a river / swimming hole where a lifeguard is posted, etc.  (In fact, there is such a place [1] close to me that is rather well-mapped and it is quite interesting).

Especially in different cultures / regions / countries, similar-but-different (related, but not the same) kinds of things like "summer camps" and camp-sites are simply going to need distinct tags.  It's not usually a good idea to conflate all of these things together into one big bucket and expect that all the subtle nuances are going to get captured.  For example, the example I site is tagged landuse=recreation_ground, which isn't wrong, but it might be argued isn't wholly right, either.  Let's not endlessly insist that objects are the same worldwide, as they most certainly are not.  For this, we have different tags.  The world is messy, and our attempts at tagging, like many aspects of language (natural, as we speak and write, and artificial, like coding, tagging and machine processing for databases) have ambiguities, subtle shifts in meaning and essentially-impossible-to-categorize aspects to them.  We have no choice to live with this.  We can discuss better tagging, that's fine, but we should realize that we will not always come to wide agreement, especially with a single, one-size-fits-all solution (and the urge to deprecate what doesn't fit into a single bucket).

[1] https://www.osm.org/relation/11125104