[Tagging] relevance of water taps as opposed to fountains

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

I see the wiki yesterday has received some more question marks regarding distinction of water taps and drinking fountains, claiming that the drinking fountain tag has fewer usage as the water tap and “many fountains also qualify for the water tap tag”.

IMHO this is the result of loosing focus. Yes, many fountains have a water tap, many bubblers have a water tap, but this doesn’t mean it is the most sensible tag to represent the feature as a whole, nor is it a reason to dismiss the more pertinent tags with the argument that water tap has more usage.

We could say the same for toilets, they also regularly provide water taps.
We typically focus on the most significant aspect of a thing.

A water tap that isn’t part of a drinking fountain surely merits tagging, and as there may be no other established “main tag” in the case of non-potable water, it seems right there is a man_made tag for it. But if the tap is part of an amenity=toilets, it becomes much less significant and is usually only implied and not mapped explicitly at all.

Similarly the tap that is part of a drinking fountain cannot represent the whole fountain, hence it shouldn’t be in “competition” with the fountain tag, it could be added as a property like tap=* but adding it as man_made to the amenity (which is supposed to represent the whole feature) would just be a misrepresentation and misleading.

Cheers Martin 

sent from a phone