I’m trying to tag some of the LDS churches in my area, but I’m confused why the Feature Type for the LDS Church is listed as “School Grounds” when the LDS Church doesn’t operate many schools outside of BYU. If my assumptions are correct and this Feature Type is intended for their churches, I think a better and more accurate amenity to use would be “Place of Worship”. Also, simply removing the amenity/education tag is insufficient because it reverts the Feature Type back to “School Grounds”. Is it possible to switch the amenity for the LDS Church from “School Grounds” to “Place of Worship”? And where can I suggest or make this change to the OSM interface?
The preset you’re seeing is for schools operated by the LDS Church. It comes from the Name Suggestion Index, which tracks common brands and operators for use as editor presets. I assume this one got added because enough schools in OSM were tagged as being operated by the LDS Church. This isn’t specific to schools or religious institutions. Any point of interest can be tagged with operator=* to indicate who runs it. In iD, this is the Operator field. It can be confusing sometimes that the operator takes precedence over the feature type in the UI.
Church denominations are handled differently, because they aren’t always tightly associated with a single organization. If you choose the Place of Worship or Christian Church preset, you’ll see a Denomination field (denomination=*) where you can enter the name of the denomination. Until we finish making this field more user-friendly, this is an established keyword in snake_case rather than freeform text. When denomination=* is used, operator=* often refers to a more specific organizational unit. For Catholics this would be a diocese; for LDS maybe a stake?
As things stand, the most common denomination=* values being used for LDS churches and temples are mormon, latter_day_saints, and latter-day_saints. For reasons you can probably guess, some mappers refuse to use the first one, while others disagree on the punctuation of the other two. A proposal to unify the tagging remains unresolved. Regardless, if you use one of these values, it’s more likely to get recognized by any software that needs to distinguish an LDS church from one belonging to another denomination.
Taking a quick look around with overpass turbo, the only things I can find that look intentionally tagged as amenity=school + operator=The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are high school seminary buildings that I changed within the last year. I’m pretty sure that you can only find seminary buildings in the Mountain West.
My ability to navigate a git history and GitHub PRs is failing me so that I can’t find who or when this was originally added to NSI, other than that it has been there for several years, so I’m confused what the thought for adding this to NSI was. To my knowledge, they operate schools in less industrialized countries, but over the last decade or so have started closing them, and I’ve never been able to find public information about the schools. I’d say that this doesn’t make sense to be in NSI.
Aside: on operator=* values on church buildings, I’d say that “The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints” is the most correct value. I can see 3 groups that could be considered the operator here: (1) the people in charge of regular common maintenance, which rotates between local units (ward or branch) on a regular basis. (2) the people in charge of scheduling building use, which rotates between local units but at a different cadence. (3) the people in charge of irregular or long term maintenance, which (I think) happens at the area level. (1) and (2) change too often, and the boundaries for (3) are not published to my knowledge, so I think the name of the church fits best.
There are around 70 tagged worldwide. I have no idea if that coverage is accurate though.
The entry got added through an automated process. I think this actually suggests a solution to a longstanding problem that’s been preventing NSI from offering denomination presets.