Disclaimer: I’ve been heavily involved in original discussion at: Tagging baby swings which describes the problem (and possible solutions), so my opinions are only my opinions, and all that.
It depends on what you mean by “renaming”. Changing the meaning of existing tag is very hard if not impossible. Adding a new, clearly defined and non-ambiguous tag is OK , and deprecating existing tag is possible (but requires some work).
Usually, the result is that both old tagging and new tagging will coexist for quite some time (making more work for data consumers), hopefully with new non-ambiguos tagging growing in use, and old (ambigous&problematic) tagging shrinking in use.
I agree about commonness. I personally work around the issue by micromapping each swing if they differ, i.e.:
- if it is only 4 regular swings, I’d map whole swingset as single node tagged
playground=swing+capacity=4, but - if it is a swingset with 1 regular + 2 baby swings, I’ll map it is two nearby nodes: one as
playground=swing+capacity=1and other asplayground=baby_swing+capacity=2)
That solves ambiguity in clear way which is easy for data consumers, and is not too much work for me (as I’m micromapping playground equipment anyway), preserving all usable information, and only information that is lost is mechanical structural implementation details (i.e. how are swings divided between swingsets) – a good tradeoff IMHO, as in vast majority of the cases it really does not matter much is there is 2 swingsets with 2 swings each - one next to the other, or one swingset with 4 swings (with or without middle support).