Greetings.
I noticed a formatting discrepancy on the National Register of Historic Places wiki page and the Key:nrhp:criteria pages.
On both pages it states:
One should enter the value as letter in parentheses. If the site satisfies more than one criteria, one can separate the values with a comma, not a semicolon.
It seems peculiar to explicitly mandate parentheses (A) and a comma separator , instead of using the standard OSM multi-value semicolon separator ; and raw letters A. The wiki doesn’t offer any explanation for this design choice.
Does anyone know the historical or technical context behind this formatting?
If there isn’t a specific reason, such as an active data consumer or script that strictly requires this exact syntax, I propose that we update the documentation and deprecate this formatting. @watmildon offered to clean up existing features to use standard OSM formatting (e.g., nrhp:criteria=A;B instead of (A),(B)).
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Taginfo only shows JOSM Presets as a register consumer so no help there.
Really does feel like this is just a loose end but I guess we will find out! 
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Hi all, I was the one who created the NRHP JOSM preset. When adding the criteria options I just used what existed on the wiki (the version that includes parentheses and commas for delimiter). It would be a simple fix to switch to the A;B version instead. I thought it was odd when I first encounted the wiki description so I endorse this change (assuming no compatibility issues).
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I’m pretty sure the parentheses come from the subsection headings in 36 CFR 60.4. There doesn’t seem to be a strict written convention to always punctuate them like that, as there would be for something like “501(c)(3)”. The more common convention seems to be “Criterion A”. So it was probably just a misunderstanding at some point along the line.
I’m more confused about the first sentence of the wiki page:
The National Register of Historic Places (NRHP) is the US federal government’s registry of historic properties established by the National Historic Preservation Act and administered by the National Park Service/Department of Interior. The registry contains over 94,000 buildings and sites important for architecture, history, archaeology, events, and more in the United States, territories of the US, Micronesia, Palau, Marshall Islands, and Morocco.
(emphasis added)
That’s the American Legation in Tangier.
You learn something new every day!