FYI: There is a proposal of Fractale in the wiki for a new tagging scheme for hiking water sources that you might want to notice. He hasn’t announced it here, so I do.
Ha, that originates from me having converted some amenity=drinking_water to waterway=stream somewher in Argentina and our discussion that ensued.
My comments:
1)the names are too long!
2) For the example given, that is a spring, we already have Tag:natural=spring - OpenStreetMap Wiki (and it has tags for all the properties maybe apart from capacity)
3) for sources that are not spring, there is waterway=stream. I am not sure there is a way to indicate if the water is drinkable but I also think that would be quite subjective, who is to judge that? I will drink a lot of water that others will zealously treat and i am usually fine.
I think the motivation is to have something in the database that one can search for, so in a way it would mimic the functional/spatial distinction we have for highways and waterways. I think it is a bit superfluous, but I am curious what others think.
This is a draft only. It’s not a must to announce yet.
As you and others have already pointed out on the discussion page, it is better to use the already established tagging scheme drinking_water and extend it if necessary.
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For a quick example of what is possible with the current data, here is an Overpass query for the sample area around Muir Pass, returning all waterway nodes closer than 20 m to paths, as well as springs, fountains, watering places and official sources of drinking water. It can be tweaked e.g. to include further water sources, to not return intermittent sources, or regarding the distance between path and water source.
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I won’t oppose. As long as it keeps people from mapping snow-fields that will continue melting long into summer as amentiy=drinking_water I am fine with it 
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