This. I think deprecating things, renaming tags and other notions should be carried only after there has been shown that the advantages of doing so clearly outweigh disadvantages of doing so.
For example, deprecating amenity=kiosk in favor of shop=kiosk was likely a good move, and much more popular way of tagging the same thing existed, and those taggings were just a mistake and causing the confusion, for no benefit to anyone involved.
Taginfo seems to disagree: e.g. razed:building | Keys | OpenStreetMap Taginfo, disused:shop | Keys | OpenStreetMap Taginfo etc.
But I have another question: what problem exactly do you think is that deprecating that tag would solve? Make a database smaller? Tagspace neater? Enforcing the bureaucracy?
I do not see any real benefit (afterall, data consumers which don’t care about razed:railway or whatever just won’t render it or use it otherwise), but I foresee significant harm to community (while I’m not a railway fanboy, I know people who are, and I can guess how they’d feel).
Intentionally causing that harm just to prove that I’m right and they’re wrong would not be very admirable human trait, at least in my view.
Absolutely. I too would like to remind people that OSM is primarily about community. Data correctness comes second. Then there is looooong list of other stuff, and only then come concerns like “useless data” / “data which doesn’t belong”.
I can see no way how the latter could outweigh the former, but I’m willing to learn about the details of the allegedly terrible harm that those few thousand entries in database are causing.
(Not to mention that there is no 100% agreement on what constitutes “unwelcome data” – but see more about that below).
I’ll have to disagree here. Live and let others live, eh? If it is not actively harming anyone else, I wouldn’t want to intentionally alienate whole communities of contributors just because they broke some bureaucratic rule without causing harm to anyone else.
For example, valuable OSM contributors dropped out at OSM licence schism back in CC-BY-SA vs. ODbL days (which was very bad and regretful period and I’m still not convinced it was worth it), and many more almost did (myself included).
But at least that schism had some reasonable rationale behind it why it was a good idea to do switch.
On the other hand, just deleting significant work people had put in because one finds it useless and conforming to ground truth best practice without any comparable benefit of doing so is very bad idea, IMHO.
For example, I might find roof:colour completely worthless data, and not wanting to add it, and could even point out that that it shouldn’t be in the database as it fails verifiability “rule” - i.e. most satellite images are not completely true color (so if people use them to map, it’s wrong), and even if they were perfectly true, most people do not go out of their way to get and use correct ICC profile for their display devices (much less recalibrate them periodically), and even if they did, human color perception is inherently subjective, thus mapping color fails the verifiability “rule” in any case.
So, should we go willy-nilly deleting all those roof:color tags? It’s “against the rules” afterall!
Absolutely not. At least not without having extended discussion with all those people, finding out what they get out of mapping those, weighting those benefits that they perceive against the benefits that the removing of such tags would bring (which are basically only insignificantly smaller current database at the expense of equally bigger history database, as far as I can see?)
Well, it is not a “rule”, it is good practice, if wiki is to be believed (not that one should unconditionally believe the wiki, either). While we are that, deprecated tags are not “forbidden” either, to the best of my knowledge. One may still use them, and if history teaches us anything it is that deprecating and especially removing railway=razed would just create bad blood, without solving anything.
Even if those were forbidden by technical means, those would likely be re-mapped as railway=abandoned and then one would have incorrect data instead of useless data, and would likely keep being remapped by other railway enthusiasts again and again, and delete again and again by “rules enforcers”, only wasting everyone’s time.
How about we just let it be and move on instead of wasting virtually infinite amount of effort on something which will only make people angry and not improve the situation? Who would get harmed by that?
Also, some popular things break “on the ground rule”, like unsigned opening_hours (many a kiosk over here for example), or housenumbers in many countries, or country borders for that matter, or even name tag. We still (perhaps grudgingly) leave them in the DB. Because there would be less, not more, happiness in the community if we removed those.
TL;DR: as they would say around here “ne čačkaj mečku” (which would be equivalent of “don’t mess with a hornet nest (without a very good reason)”. Because,there are a lot of problems that this would cause, for no tangible benefit at all.