[Talk-ca] Tourist attraction on private land

[Jarek Piórkowski]

On Fri, 9 Jul 2021 at 17:08, Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> the DWG has received a complaint about
> https://www.openstreetmap.org/node/1834726456, mapped as "Al Capone's
> Hideout" tourist attraction on Letterkenny Road, Quadeville, Ontario.
>
> The complainant says that the fact of it being marked on the map leads
> to trespassing, and would like to have it removed.
>
> But clearly it exists, and seems to be a bona fide tourist attraction
> (type "al capone hideout letterkenny" into your favourite search engine
> - you'll find some mentions of tourists not allowed, other mentions of
> driving your car up the hill).

This is a bit semantic as to what exactly is a "tourist attraction".

IMO: If the owner or authorized agent denies access, it doesn't seem
to me to be a tourist attraction.

The aerial imagery available in iD doesn't seem to show anything
through the tree cover, so unless someone has other imagery or
license-compatible photos, this might not be mappable at all.
Otherwise, give it building=cabin or historic=ruins and any other tags
describing verifiable physical properties of the object.

Something can be interesting to tourists without being a tourist attraction.

Say I'm interested in modernist architecture. There are several very
interesting examples of modernist houses by Arthur Erickson that are
privately owned. There are websites that list them and discuss their
architecture. I might want to visit the houses and look at them from
the road, to learn more about the architecture's relationship with the
land or whatnot; if possible, I would have liked to go inside. That
doesn't make them a tourism=attraction, at most we can add architect=*
and start_date=* on the building.

As an extreme example, if a shed in my backyard got famous because a
bunch of sites on the internet or some people in local bars said there
were ghosts there, does that make it a tourist attraction? If I put up
a sign for it and charge a fee for admission, maybe. If I put up a "no
entry" sign because I don't want to find strangers in my backyard,
probably not. If I don't do either (for example because it's out in
the middle of nowhere and I don't care if anyone goes there) it's more
debatable, but IMHO probably still not deserving of a
tourism=attraction tag in OSM - if nothing else, it doesn't really
seem verifiable in sense of
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Verifiability

I suspect there's similar cases of unwilling-tourist-attractions in
other countries. One could write to the tagging mailing list, but I
expect we'd get some nice examples but no wider consensus.

Some similar cases I'm thinking of, of objects that are technically on
private land but occasional non-disruptive visits are accepted, are
tagged for what they physically are, but not with tourism=attraction
even though there's websites listing these as places for tourists to
visit.

--Jarek