[Tagging] Tagging of a politician's office

[Minh Nguyen]

Vào lúc 00:48 2022-05-12, Nathan Case đã viết:
> On 11/05/2022 23:08, Minh Nguyen wrote:
>> I think office=government government=official would avoid this 
>> confusion and potentially apply to a broader range of facilities. 
>> Would there be interest in migrating to this tag instead, for the 
>> physical offices that are apolitical in nature? 
> 
> At least in the UK, the term "government" is very specific and being an 
> elected representative =/= being in government.
> 
> "HM Government consists of the Prime Minister, their Cabinet and junior 
> ministers, supported by the teams of non-political civil servants that 
> work in government departments." [1]
> 
> It is therefore incorrect (at least in purely British terminology) to 
> tag a politician's consistency office as being a government office.

I was aware of the narrower British definition of government but figured 
that government=* is already applicable beyond Whitehall, quite 
literally in the case of government=parliament.

> On 12/05/2022 08:24, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
>> so we do not want to cover campaigning offices with the tag? 
>> office=politician sounds as if it could cover different kind of 
>> facilities, a campaign office for an individual politician but also a 
>> working office (non public) and an office where the politician will 
>> meet with citizens. Maybe the non-public working office will not be 
>> tagged like this. because it will be inside a bigger structure where 
>> several of these offices are, which will get some office=government tag.
> 
> I think campaigning offices are probably OK - though I don't think such 
> usage would be very wide in the UK. Perhaps we could have a sub-tag 
> politician=* to specify the type of politician (e.g., 
> politician=member_of_parliament, or politician=local, or 
> politician=national_candidate).

There's inevitably a limit to how well we can model the world's 
governmental structures atop UK terminology. As fascinating as it is to 
hear about the particulars in each jurisdiction, I think these 
differences serve as arguments against oversimplification. Conflating 
campaign offices with constituent service offices would be 
counterintuitive in other jurisdictions, given the stark differences 
between these kinds of facilities and their services. I'm struggling to 
think of an analogy -- maybe conflating shop=car_parts with 
shop=car_repair, or office=marketing with shop=supermarket.

In the interest of avoiding confusion, maybe more descriptive, top-level 
tags such as office=constituent_service and office=political_campaign 
would be appropriate. office=* is already quite a flexible key as it is.

-- 
minh at nguyen.cincinnati.oh.us