History of proposals to fix highway=path ambiguity – and a wayforward?

Based on a poll, it seems that almost half of the mappers don’t know that, either. Or, wait, is it the other half?

No. The first one is. It is a T6 path and a hiking trail.
There are some routes like this where people attempt to go, fail, and then subsequently delete the path from the map. The author is clearly upset. More details in

The second does not have any paths on the map. I’ve mapped it with a Path during preparation, based on trails from websites but it was deleted almost instantly. When I actually went there, I’ve found some cairns marking certain sections as safe.
This thread has more details on that:

Who decides on this? That’s the whole point of discussions. If I can just introduce a new tag, then I might start mapping these pathless routes and climbing pitches with a new main tag instead of climbing=route, for example.

There are other discussions about introducing scrambling as a separate way, as well as motorcycleway. All currently mapped as a Path, or not at all, depending on if it gets deleted.

Also, if you simply scroll to the first post, there’s a bunch of related threads with more details already linked. Each explains a particular problem in more detail than is worth repeating here.