I think it’s uncontroversial that a hypothetical platform named after, say, a railway worker or some special event, should have a corresponding name tag. However, using name for some sort of a platform reference/station name combination like “Platform 2” or “XYZ Station, Platform 1” appears to be much more common (taginfo says about 32.5% of railway platforms have a name set – almost as many as have a ref!). Whether such names should be encouraged or discouraged appears to be somewhat controversial. The wiki currently lists name as an optional tag and avoids describing which names should be used:
Name of the platform, if it has one
I’d like to know how the community thinks about this.
How should setting a name like “Platform 2” on railway=platforms be handled?
should be encouraged
should be optional (i.e. similar to how the wiki page currently describes it)
To add some additional context, I’m sure that the majority of the uses of name on railway=platform comes from public_transport=platform (which many railway=platform also have) and thus share the name with the corresponding stop, not the platform number itself (since there already is a better tag for it, one which is language independent: ref / local_ref).
In theory, name can be dropped on public_transport=platform if they’re already connected to a public_transport=stop_area, though they still are added to the platforms nonetheless and QA like StreetComplete (which deliberately ignores relations) force a name on these anyway.