I would like to invite suggestions/opinions for a new tag to map small tea shops/stalls (as a drink) found abundantly throughout South Asia and other similar developing regions. Such a tag would make mapping the same really easier since what we do now is just tag them as amenity=cafe, which is pretty misleading, since a cafe must sell coffee, along with the other outdoor seating, structure, building material, etc tags that describe the usual features of such tea stalls.
All of these redundant tags and confusions arising from the same could simply be avoided, by introducing this very crucial tag signifying the very common sight of the regular independently-run small tea stalls found in most South Asian countries, and thus start using/documenting India-specific tags in the process.
An appropriate tag I could think for them would be amenity=tea_stall.
I would like to discuss your views and opinions on this. If we see a net positive response, we can start building the wiki page for it and subsequently presets, icons, etc, thus pushing the practicality of such tags further.
On a previous discussion started by @contrapunctus here at Inviting suggestions for Indian POIs it seemed like they already decided on amenity=cafe + street_vendor=yes. As for outdoor seating or building material, even with your proposed tag, not all tea stalls are same, we might just have to add those tags for more accurate information anyway.
Could be used for accuracy, yes. But the basic intuition of the POI, that, it is such a tea stall and not some other hybrid established coffee-serving business with shanty infrastructure and specific features differentiating it from the “normal cafes”, is worth making a separate tag for. Especially when the amount of times they reappear across India and other neighbouring countries is so massive.
a generally informal place with sit-down facilities selling beverages and light meals and/or snacks. This includes coffee-shops and tea shops selling perhaps tea, coffee and cakes, through to bistros selling meals with alcoholic drinks.
So it’s not necessary for an amenity=cafe to serve coffee.
The benefits of amenity=tea_stall I can see is that it is an all-in-one tag that may be more obvious to Indian mappers.
The downside is that it is a new tag, needing documentation, photos, editor presets, rendering icons, etc. Most importantly, it may not be rendered by the standard layer, Organic Maps, OsmAnd, etc (possibly indefinitely, knowing how these things go).
You could just create an India-/South Asia-specific “tea stall” preset in editors instead, which inserts amenity=cafe + drink:tea=yes + street_vendor=yes. That reduces your work somewhat, and the problem of renderers is avoided.
