Fully agree, though I find it hard to find the right tone that strikes a balance between not being too prescriptive yet still being clear. Do you have a suggestion of a page for some other tag those tone you like so that I can try and imitate it?
Removed
Changed the first paragraph a bit, is it better now?
Adjusted, liked them so I took your suggestions as-is. Also adjusted the description of the data items accordingly.
Hmm, not really sure how to handle this best. Changed bath->“bathe/take a bath” in leisure=bathing_place and added a reference to the wiktionary entry for bathe (bathe - Wiktionary, the free dictionary), but if anyone has a nother suggestion I’d love to hear it.
In some cases, yes. (There you literally share a hot tub with a stranger - mapped as a public_bath.)
I’ve looked at a dozen or so public_baths with the help of Overpass and there is a lot of variation.
Here is a typical example in Germany - a thermal bath:
With a water temperature of 32C (90F) you can get around by swimming but you wouldn’t want to do anything strenuous. There are no marked lanes. It’s about fun and relaxation, not exercise. There may be whirlpools, slides… so it sits somewhere between a public swimming pool and a water park.
Sometimes (example) places seem to be mapped as public_bath in Germany that would be called a lido in the UK, and tagged as a sports_centre with sport=swimming.
I follow your definition up until a swimming pool with sport=swimming. Backyard swimming pool are relatively small. They could accommodate about 15 people or a couple just swimming around. Neither would be considered serious swimming. Once you add sport, that assumes the pool much larger. This could even be read as having competition lanes. Either way it would have enough room to go beyond a couple swim strokes allowed by bathing_place definition.
Sorry, I wasn’t being very clear. At that point I wasn’t trying to define what public_bath should be, just describing what I found when I looked at examples of objects that have been tagged amenity=public_bath. I agree with you and I wouldn’t tag a public swimming pool that is used mainly for exercise as a public_bath.
There are places though that fit the criteria for bathing_place where people also do “proper” swimming e.g. along the shore and back. I don’t think @02JanDal was trying to exclude those from bathing_place. It’s more that having the space and water depth that are required for swimming isn’t a requirement of a bathing_place.
No, sorry. From what I understand, the Wiki has to strike a balance between describing how to map for people who just want to know how to tag a facility they see, and describing current tagging to data consumers. For the first group it’s helpful to draw clear distinctions and the Wiki pages now probably do a pretty good job. For the second group it’s probably more helpful to summarise actual tagging practice, including all its inconsistencies. It’s possible to find out a bit more about actual tagging with Overpass but it’s a very time-intensive activity and I’m not sure how to integrate all of it into a Wiki page.
A few more data points
at least in Germany public_bath doesn’t just overlap with sports_centre but also with recreation_ground, all three are used to map places with “Freibad” in the name, public outdoor swimming pools. What isn’t clear to me is whether this is based at all on the dominant function (e.g. exercise or recreation) or if it’s more or less arbitrary
many places with “Badestelle” in the name in Germany are currently tagged as just a sport=swimming node or as a leisure=water_park or as a leisure=swimming_area. I’m fairly confident many of them are good candidates for bathing_place instead. (In one place I saw over a dozen water_parks scattered around a single lake.)
Seems that swimming pools are the natural dividing point. Most backyard or community pools could be considered a bathing_place=yes because they are not designed for serious swimming. This is pretty much true even for those with an obvious deep end.
Larger pools tends to be designed to allow competitive swimming. Adding sport=swimming should be enough to indicate the increased size and ablility to setup competitive sized swim lanes. Not sure if I’m forgetting an important aspects.
A backyard swimming pool would not be considered a Badestelle in German, I suspect it wouldn’t be considered a badplats in Sweden either, and it probably wouldn’t be considered a leisure=bathing_place in OSM. A bathing_place is always in (or at?) a natural body of water such as a river, reservoir, lake or the sea.
The swimming pool can be tagged with leisure=swimming_pool, and then you can add sport=swimming if it’s suitable for competitive swimming, or more generally, for exercise (the OSM idea of what sport means is a bit wider than in English).
Yeah, while technically a pool is a place where you can bathe (thus a bathing place), I think we should draw the line at it being in a natural body of water (including reservoirs, canals and similar man-made-but-very-similar-to-natural-water). For individual pools (as in private backyards or community pools) leisure=swimming_pool should suffice, for more advanced things they could be included in amenity=public_bath, leisure=water_park, etc.
Agree with what’s been said about sport=swimming, in that it should be used for competition or exercise. Would like to additionally include that it should only be used for features that are specifically for competition/exercise swimming, such as a pool with lanes, otherwise we’d end up tagging every backyard pool and all oceans as sport=swimming. Though it’s always possible to find exceptions in this strange world, I’d expect leisure=bathing_place to be mutually exclusive with sport=swimming (the same for amenity=public_bath, but not for instance leisure=water_park which sometimes do have pools with lanes).
People generally to do not believe anyone swims in the Hudson River or East River. I and several others do. I’d like to add locations for these to OSM but some may object because they don’t want it publicized at all. There’s at least a few location where only I have gone in that might be safe to enter.
I like the informal=no tag as there will defintely be no signposting. I like the hazard tag but could only use items that have never been used before such as hazard=current,invisibleObjects,temperature.
The main reason that I can see for the difference between leisure=bathing_place (921 examples) and leisure=swimming_area (6,000 examples) is that one is mostly used in Sweden and the other isn’t?
A sample of UK/IE usage shows that it seems to correlate with “bathing place” occurring in the name. I appreciate that in your mental picture they’re different, but I don’t think that that is borne out in OSM usage outside of Sweden.
While a decent amount of the current usage of leisure=bathing_place is in Sweden (the other larger concentration being in northeast Germany), it actually isn’t the one mostly used (at least based on a rough approximation based on overpass results) (overpass turbo). Even in Sweden leisure=swimming_area seems more common, as well as a much-larger-than-realistic number of amenity=public_bath (I’d be surprised if there’d be even a dozen places actually fitting that description here). But this inconsistency is why I (on behalf of the Swedish forum) started this thread (see here for some context in Swedish).
As I see it, this trio of tags is used inconsistently outside Sweden as well, and in particular, the current most used tag of them (leisure=swimming_area) is almost universally used in conflict with its definition on the wiki (another approach could have been to deprecate leisure=bathing_place and change the definition of leisure=swimming_area, but no one here has proposed that so far, and personally I think that the result would be worse).
A majority of the 6000 current usages of leisure=swimming_area are likely misstagged according both to the old and the new clarified descriptions. While a decent amount and possibly borderline, I think it’s few enough to go through manually and update (or leave fixmes/notes where not clear how to handle from the armchair perspective). I haven’t gotten around to that yet (want to improve the wiki a bit further based on the feedback here, as well as rewrite the category page), but as written in the OP I intend to create a MapRoulette challenge for this (and likely do a large part of the work myself).
another approach could have been to deprecate leisure=bathing_place and change the definition of leisure=swimming_area
I am glad this wasn’t proposed as they are quite different features, possibly. If you cannot swim (shallow, small) no definition of swimming area should cover it. Think for example of thermal sources, lovely to bath but often not possible to swim.