It’s not a name, it’s a description! Maybe a brand.
Right now their reference book is still “The book of Mormon”.
Mormon is short and reduces the risk of creating many variants as already seen in taginfo.
In my opinion, not a big deal, it’s a database value. Short and consistent is good.
LDS? Never heard before (long version and Mormon, sure).
But if you want to denote through an anagram that religions are the opium of the masses, a good hint!
Brevity can be positive for the database, but this benefit is sometimes outweighed by other considerations. For one thing, denomination=mormon doesn’t adequately distinguish between the numerous denominations associated with Mormonism or Restorationism. Like it or not, we aren’t about to eliminate hundreds of popular denomination=* values in favor of denomination=protestant, denomination=episcopal in favor of denomination=anglican, etc.
Mappers who belong to LDS Church have been complaining about the denomination=mormon tag for years. I think it would be unfortunate if those of us who don’t belong to the church were to wave it off as no big deal. Their local knowledge surely counts for something, even if we can’t practically accommodate the church’s official request to “use all 48 characters” as the tag value.
Let’s go for L48s then! As Mateusz Konieczny stated: what their president says has no direct impact on tagging.
If you want something unambiguous, use the wikidata identifier as denomination identifier. Consensus with 16 millions “against” 7 billions? Q42504 is neutral and remains stable over the years.
Didn’t knew they had many “sub” churches inside Mormons, no problem for adding another denomination just the 48-thing is not practical (not to mention that in the 48 characters you want to replace spaces by underscores, remove the article, making something different that the 48 characters).
The fact that they say “use all 48 characters” in no uncertain terms without giving the long name back shows the practicability for mappers to use their favorite denomination.
This isn’t a popularity contest. Whatever we use for denomination=*, we aren’t just referring to the place of worship by it; we’re also by extension referring to its members by the same term. Some of those members happen to be our fellow mappers, and in some regions of the U.S., they happen to be a sizable portion of the mapping community. One of OSM’s core values is community cohesion; this would be a good opportunity to apply that value.
From my perspective as a practicing Roman Catholic, if I had come upon OSM back in the day and seen Catholic churches classified as “papist” churches, I probably would not have stuck around – even if, very logically speaking, Catholics are known for their obedience to the Pope. My understanding is that “Mormon” isn’t quite as derogatory, but it’s also, like, not a big deal if we can avoid it while making the map a little more useful.
The proposal already includes denomination:wikidata=Q42504 just to avoid any possible misunderstanding. One of the principles of *:wikidata=* tagging is that the human-readable tag should refer to more or less the same thing as the Wikidata subtag, hence the move away from mormon.
Enough people have commented on it at this point that I’m perfectly happy with switching the proposal to use denomination=latter_day_saint. As long as it’s applied consistently, punctuation specifics are not important.
I’m sorry, what? It’s the name used on every building and on all printed and digital materials. How would these not make it a name?
While it is foundational to the faith, The Book of Mormon is only one of several books of scripture. This doesn’t make it better to use what used to be a derogatory nickname that we never chose for ourselves. The reason the variants exist in the first place is that the previous version of this conversation never reached a consensus, so people didn’t want to use denomination=mormon, but a replacement was not standardized. That’s why I opened this topic, to find a consensus and remove the variants.
No direct impact, but still a non-zero impact, right? It should not be a large effort to recognize and classify a group by the name we have asked the public to use? And my opinion, as a member of said church and the mapping community, should have an impact too, yes?
Yes, but as Minh already said, a denomination:wikidata= should be paired with a human readable denomination= value
My two cents: I don’t think the denomination=mormon tag should be deprecated entirely, but rather a specific denomination=latter_day_saint (or latter-day_saint; I think the former with all underscores would be less prone to typos, even if it doesn’t quite match the church’s preferred orthography…) tag should supersede it where specifically the building in question belongs to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints.
denomination=mormon is still a useful tag for the purposes of adding info to church buildings with congregations with overarching beliefs in Mormonism, but that aren’t members of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, i.e. “the Utah church”, etc. In much the same way we still have denomination=catholic or denomination=protestant if a mapper isn’t quite sure more precisely what it ought to be.
Like I said, the two terms aren’t equally offensive. But if time elapsed is the deciding factor, then 2018 seems like an eternity ago. We’ve renamed wholecountries since then.
I’m sympathetic to the idea that denomination=mormon could remain as a theoretical catch-all for places of worship of undetermined affiliation, but my sense is that this will be very, very rare in practice. The on-the-ground rule tilts very heavily in favor of other terms. I don’t think you’ll see a sign on a church that says “Church of Christ” and make the logical leap that, obviously, this church belongs to a Mormon denomination.
Oh I agree it would be very rare in practice; after all, anecdotally I’d wager that 95+% of all “Mormon” facilities around the world are affiliated with the “mainstream LDS Church”.
Likewise, to your point, I do also agree that it isn’t going to be immediately obvious to a ‘gentile’ exactly what denomination a “Church of Christ” belongs. However, I don’t think it’s appropriate to tag it with denomination=latter_day_saint either. In keeping denomination=mormon but introducing =latter_day_saint for the “mainstream” church, we’re doing two things:
striving to be more respectful to the membership of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints by using a tag more specific to their particular church, and,
striving to be respectful of all other sects of Mormonism by not explicitly grouping them with the LDS Church, and,
vice versa.
For instance with respect to the second and third points, do members of the “mainstream” LDS Church want to be associated with the FLDS? I’m guessing no. And frankly the proverbial cat is out of the bag with respect to splintered-off sects: they may not be big, but there are a bunch of them. Some of the biggest, most notorious Mormon communities in Canada are populated by ‘splinter’ groups, e.g. Bountiful, BC (populated originally by members of the FLDS, whose bishop was excommunicated by Warren Jeffs in 2002). I think it would be presumptuous of us to group any and all Mormonist adherents under “Latter-day Saints” when many of the splinter groups are vehemently disavowed by the LDS Church, and conversely many of the splinter groups believe the LDS Church had been “corrupted” and theirs is the “true” Mormonist belief system (yadda yadda yadda…).
At a glance, I’m unsure what clearly distinguishes this building as an LDS or other Mormon temple. Is it the absence of a cross on the tip of the steeple? At least in the U.S., that architectural style is also extremely common among other unrelated denominations, such as Baptists and Methodists.
But maybe you’re able to make assumptions based on the local prevalence of certain denominations? If you can assume it belongs to The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints just based on aerial imagery, then yes, the proposal would be to retag denomination=* to something more specific.
I am also a Latter-day Saint, and I think this proposal looks good. Let me know if there is anything you need help with.
While I would naturally use a hyphen as a member of the church, it makes sense from the standpoint of a mapper to use underscores to keep punctuation consistent. I have no problem with this.
Replacing denomination=mormon with denomination=latter_day_saint (however punctuated) seems fine to me.
Some input from the LDS members present in this conversation here would be helpful, with regards to sects not affiliated with the mainstream LDS church. How should these denominations be tagged? Specifically, should they:
be tagged denomination=latter_day_saint as well, or
be distinguished from the mainstream church by remaining denomination=mormon, or
It sounds like at this point the general consensus is that other smaller sects be given their own value for denomination= (see already existing (albeit small) uses for denomination=community_of_christ, denomination=Fundamentalist Church ..., denomination=latter_day_saint_bickertonite, or denomination=house_of_aaron), while still technically allowing denomination=mormon for cases where the mapper knows it is a related denomination, but not which one, in the same way that denomination=catholic is currently used.
Voting has been delayed because my original message to the tagging mailing list didn’t make it through. Is anyone available to forward this proposal there for me?
