[Tagging] RFC: Removal of Eruvs from OSM, and further boundry=religious

[Evan Carroll]

I've been reading the input on this and I'm going to move forward next week
with a proposal to deprecate  ALL boundary=religious. I don't feel the
specific issues I've raised have been addressed. I think this will come
down to a vote. Which is fine, hopefully we can all agree to run OSM
democratically. I'm cool either way, let's formalize it. So to respond
briefly,

* I care _less_ about boundary=fishing_line though it's annoying for
usability. Maybe someone wants to research drone hazards.
Boundary=fishing_line is minimally useful for everyone. The only question
is whether or not its utility warrants inclusion.
* I do have an objection to a boundary=religious because more than being
annoying for usability, it's exclusionary. It provides no value to anyone
other than one group, excludes others from participating in the discussion
about the item, and presents a useability problem (from my perspective).

These are my issues,

* EXCLUSION IN OSM: An Eruv excludes community members of other religions
and non-believers from engaging in a dispute. Further, an Eruv requires
renting all non-Jews' homes in a ceremonial lease with the government to
use non-Jews property, potentially against their consent. Including other
(non-Jews) place of worship. To the extent that a religion requires
excluding other religions, do we want this in OSM?
* DISPUTE RESOLUTION: It gives us no method of dispute resolution. If one
person or a group of people get to say it's right _because_ they said so,
we have a problem. We should avoid these situations. Presumably, we don't
want to handle ecclesiastical differences on the tagging list.
* EQUAL ACCESS TO FEATURE: Are all religions entitled to
boundary=religious? This needs to be a policy either way. Specifically, why
won't the Church of Satan be allowed equal treatment here, and how will we
exclude just their religion?
* ABSTRACT CRITERIA: Are only boundaries with physical demarcations
allowed? Is an area by decree of authority welcome? Can a boundary be made
with arbitrary objects? For example, can I claim the area between
Niagara Falls and the Rio Grande are sacred grounds for my religion? Those
are actual definable features. It would be very easy to piggy back on them
to give "objective grounds" to a boundary=religious. Moreover, an Eruv is
often a barrier hung above the ground, but one can easily imagine a
religion where the barrier must be buried below the ground: we have pipes
in OSM. Will we allow a boundary=religious if the objective status is
determined by digging up the pipe?
* DEFINITION IN OSM: How will we know what the demarcation is, whether
fishing line or otherwise, when it's not listed? How will the wikipage for
tagging an Eruv read: entire tomes are devoted to its existence.
https://www.amazon.com/dp/1680251325 Eruv of fishing line has specific
requirements that are subject to different Jewish laws: ie., does fishing
line work, how high from the pole must the line be, Can you mount a pole to
a pole? Should this be documented?
* AUTHORITY: How should another person maintain an Eruv? If the fishing
line deviates from the boundary in OSM should the boundary be updated
without the approval of the clergy? Think a prankster extending an Eruv.
How can OSM provide any assurances of this?
* EXPLICITLY STATEFUL: Do we want features where in the normal course of
operation they can be invalided and have to be checked weekly? An Eruv is
"down" if any link is down. How does OSM track the status of the Eruv?
Guidance of this is, if the Eruv can be fixed you're supposed to tell
people of the status. If it can NOT be fixed you're supposed to withhold
the status. How do we reflect that in OSM?
https://www.sefaria.org/Peninei_Halakhah%2C_Shabbat.29.8.7?lang=bi&with=all&lang2=en
Do
we have state_of_fishing_line, and state_of_eruv_for_adherents tag?

There is no policy at all about this. I think it's time to draft something
more transparent then to assume boundary=religious is an "anything goes
because someone thinks it" tag.

Side note, I think the technical solution to putting this stuff in another
layer is certainly an improvement. Even better though, imho, is just to
host your own PostGIS database and have a table in there that you control.

Typically, authority is central to a religion. Asking an open source
project to defer to your authority to include features is an unreasonable
request.

--
Evan Carroll - me at evancarroll.com
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