[Tagging] RFC - A broad look at fountains

[Davidoskky]

On 08/10/22 15:34, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:

> this is the result of focusing what apparently most people are interested in (drinking water), regardless of the physical details
I think this is good and I have no intention of changing this thing in fact.

> That’s why we decided some years ago to record additional detail about the structure in the fountain tag.
I wish to add more sense to how these structures are described. The 
current tagging scheme has a lot of problems with overlapping tags.

> drinking_fountain (which is somehow a duplicate of fountain=drinking ...)
man_made=drinking_fountain is an exact duplicate of fountain=bubbler; 
there is no reason for having two equivalent tags at all.
> All of these can already be described, although there could (should IMHO) be more properties for the details, for example:
Agreed, what I'm most interested in, however, is making sense of the 
main tags used; not the specific descriptive values.

> I give precedence to fountains over taps, for a drinking fountain you could add tap=yes or no, in case of a bigger fountain you would tag the tap as its own object.
If you use man_made=water_tap both to describe single taps of a large 
fountain and the fountain as a whole, then the tag has a double meaning 
and it's unclear what it is describing when you see it on the map.
> I believe our tagging scheme for drinking water is following general interest here.
Yes, the main interest is knowing where to find drinking water, that 
works very well.
What doesn't work is the description of what is delivering the water.
The example from Enno cannot be described unequivocally in a single way, 
it can be described in many different ways each missing out on something.

I'm not saying that this tagging scheme has to become the norm for 
tagging drinking water, I'm saying that since the option is there to tag 
drinking water places in more detail, then this scheme should make sense 
and account for all (at least most) cases in a simple and understandable 
way.

These features are not so widespread; thus the change or deprecation of 
one of them shouldn't be a big problem.
You must also realize that this scheme is probably generating a lot of 
mistags, since I imagine a lot of people are tagging drinking fountains 
as amenity=fountain (that is what I would do and what would appear to me 
as most sensible before reading 10 different wiki pages).