In trying to find what to tag a sebil/sabil, I found this tag. It seems like the author wanted to tag this specific sebil and invented a tag in Bosnian, but there isn’t any other examples of this in Sarajevo itself, so it is kind of unnecessarily restrictive, as in a tag that consists of one object and its few copies in the world. All uses of the tag but one are tagging replicas of the Sarajevo Sebilj.
Should I invent a genericised tag (fountain=sebil) and redo the tag on the Sarajevo one? Should I leave it as is and simply tag other sebils?
amenity=drinking_water and fountain=*pretty explicitly coexist, as a method of determining what kind of drinking water amenity it is. Another tag that commonly coexists with amenity=drinking_water is man_made=water_tap, and I think StreetComplete sometimes tags it alongside natural=spring, but that should probably just be natural=spring + drinking_water=yes
yes,amenity=drinking_watercan combined with "fountain", but only if the feature can somehow be considered a fountain (which I believe is the case here, a (typically) enclosed / covered drinking water fountain).
Wikipedia.en has this sentence “The term is sometimes also used to refer to simple unmanned fountains with a tap for drinking water,[1] though other names often exist for such fountains (such as çesme in Turkish).[2]”
which suggests we would want to distinguish the staffed sebils somehow from the ones without staff.
I agree that staffed sebils should probably be tagged in some other way, but these are probably increasingly not a thing in the days of indoor plumbing, even for structures intended to be manned in the first place.
Both the one in Sarajevo and the one I am thinking of tagging (one in Ierapetra) about are unmanned. From what I can gather, the Ierapetra example is disused as a water source entirely (disused:amenity=drinking_water?), and simply a historic building. In one example in Heraklion the interior has been authorised to be reused as a coffee shop, but on the rainy day I visited it was unclear if it was actually open as such after all, or whether one could use it as amenity=drinking_water.
But regardless of the specific examples that spurred my interest, the broader category is useful to be tagged as such throughout the former Ottoman empire. Given the size and style of them (small enclosed building) and the potential of these structures for reuse and perhaps disuse of the drinking water function, while retaining their historical significance, there should be a different tag entirely for the structure, like building=sebil and/or historic=sebil.