[OSM-talk] Potential problems moving/depreciating map features tags.

[Ulf Lamping]

David Earl schrieb:
> Changing amenity=blah for man_made=blah is just not productive. 
>   
There were a lot of comments of "senior mappers" like: There's too much 
work to change this, people are used to it, changing is not productive ...

Yes, changing tags is much more work than chaning the wiki page, that's 
for sure. But what do you mean with productive? Your own productiveness? 
Looking at all these comments from newbies not understanding things (or 
even worse not tagging things because of this) makes me sad. Having an 
inconsistent tagging scheme makes it very hard to learn and remember. 
Just because you had to learn it the hard way doesn't mean that others 
have do so as well, ad infinitum.

Only some examplesof strange things:
What sense makes waterway=water_point (a point to get fresh water from, 
e.g. for caravans) to you, and if you would want to use it, would you 
search it in waterway? Be honest, please :-)
As we have a shop category, why search for supermarket in amenities? 
Just because it used to be there?
> highway=cycleway works, and there are thousands of them already on the map.
>   
A clear example of how things not should be. I'm not even saying that 
the whole tag makes sense or not as I'm only occasionally using the 
bike, but:
- highway=cycleway wasn't deprecated, so we have now two tags for 
exactly the same thing (which makes it very confusing - how do you know 
if there's a slight difference?)
- the summary on map features is confusing to say the least
- the corresponding page 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Cycleway is not well written, 
lacks any fotos, ...
> It's different if its a new tag, or if the tag doesn't work (e.g. route) 
> but changing things for the language of the tag names means we're for 
> ever chasing our tails
Maybe, but is this a reason for not changing anything? With this kind of 
argumentation you could also say: "What's the reason for building a new 
streetmap from scratch? It will be a lot of work and a lot of them 
already exists" ;-)

Regards, ULFL