Sometimes you have 2 tags for the same thing, like Key:reservation
and Key:website:booking
Wouldn’t it be better to use only 1 tag instead of 2?
Or what is the reason/use to have 2 different tags for the same thing?
Because they’re not actually the same. Reservation says whether or not you need to make a reservation, while booking gives the address you use to actually do so.
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And what about this
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phone=* is older I believe, contact:phone=* is part of a scheme with contact:*=* keys. It’s good for avoiding name clashes, imagine putting links to Twitter/X in a key named x=*!
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So its better to use contact:phone=* than phone=* or not?
IMO, yes! However, some people stick to older schemes claiming support is better, which is why we’re sometimes stuck with them.
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The current answer is it doesn’t matter. While phone has been around for longer, has three to four times the usage, and continues to grow as least as much, there are still enough mappers who use contact:phone so that developers are well adviced to look for both tags if they are interested in phone numbers.
I think “contact:phone” has the problem of using more letters for the same thing, the beginning of it being all shared with similar tags (unfortunate for autocompletion to work well), didn’t make it since 2010 to overtake, so it doesn’t seem there are many reasons for preferring it over phone.
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Also with the huge advantage of being a preset for some things in iD!
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Well, it’s a vicious circle: older schemes make it into editors, grow more as a result, making it difficult for new schemes to get into common use. That’s how we’re stuck with an awful scheme for the gender of toilets, for example.
Again, note that some contact:*=* subkeys are very short, e.g. vk, ok and sip. There’s a risk of name clashes and/or ambiguity here. It’s usually better to have well structured schemes (e.g. diet:*=* and addr:*=*) as opposed to many non-prefixed keys.
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This cycle could potentially broken if some of the people advocating for adoption of the contact prefix put together a proposal and called for a vote.
A success of that vote could convince developers to switch their tools and presets to the new schema. A clear failure of the vote might cause the contact prefix to drop in popularity. As far as I’m concerned, both of these outcomes would be desirable because having two tags for the same purpose is clearly worse than picking either option.
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@Tordanik: This cycle could potentially broken if some of the people advocating for adoption of the contact prefix put together a proposal and called for a vote.
Where should you submit the proposal? What steps should you follow? I only know the steps to make a new proposal to create a new tag… But not the steps needed to vote between 2 tags.
It’s still the same proposal process. Proposals aren’t just used to introduce new tags, but also to change or deprecate existing tags.
As an example, see the recent successful proposal to deprecate cycleway=opposite, which had previously coexisted with oneway:bicycle=no as an alternative way to describe the same situation.
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Which tag do you think makes the most sense? contact:phone; contact:mobile, … or phone, mobile … ?
Didn’t something similar happen in 2019?
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Discussions/tagging/contact:phone_or_phone
I realise proposing to deprecate phone= is not exactly the same as a positive proposal to adopt the contact:scheme, but is it likely the result would be different 5 years on?
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There is a school of thought in OSM that holds that you can make mapping more accurate by adding more colons to the keys. These people will use contact:phone for now, although when a wiki vote is taken for contact:phone:voice, possibly further namespacing it with the languages understood by the person who picks up the phone, then I expect they’ll move to that.
Anyone who has actually ever parsed OSM data uses phone.
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I once looked at 2 wiki proposals related to phone. If you look at the comments about using the key: phone as the only one, I see that the people who vote against argue that they prefer contact: phone
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Discussions/tagging/contact:phone_or_phone
and
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposal:Phone
So I am inclined to submit a proposal to deprecate to drop Key phone, mobile, email,… and only submit contact:phone, contact: mobile,…
Is there anyone who would like to help with submitting/drafting the proposal?
Please don’t. This has been gone over several times before (you can look in the tagging mailing list archives if you like). Bringing back proposals like this that have been rejected at least twice just wastes everyone’s time.
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Think it’s meant for the actual alternative
And indeed, another one here for *website= vs *url