I would like more detail about how that would work. I suspect that in many of these cases, the mapper genuinely intended to convey that the information point provides information relevant to tourists. The same would apply where there is a sub tag such as information=board without board:type. Often these types of board cover a mix of information for visitors including amenities, history, geography, routes etc and don’t easily fit under more specific tags. Unless I am missing something, current tags for maps and boards don’t provide a way to indicate this kind of generic tourist information. Previously I wouldn’t have seen this as a problem in my own mapping as I felt that tourist information was a kind of implied default under the tourism tag, with specific tagging for exceptions. It seems that would no longer be the case.
In summary: if a resurvey indicates that one of these points provides tourist information, how do we tag that?
I think this is a good proposal. As a data user, it’s a pain to have to query tourism=*, except for tourism=information except for tourism=information+information=office when wanting to fetch tourist attraction type objects. (And I wasn’t aware of information=visitor_centre which I should probably be including an exception for too.)
While there’s quite a lot of work to re-check the tourism=information objects that don’t currently have information=*, this can be done gradually. And arguably these object need checking and having additional tags added to clarify what they are regardless of this proposal.
I like the clarity about tourism=information_office and tourism=visitor_centre but beyond that, I am wary of elevating information to a “top-level” tag. information=yes sounds particularly strange to me, almost as if someone were to write amenity=yes. Clearly tourism=information which you want to deprecate carries a lot more information than information=yes which you want to introduce?
For what it’s worth, Nominatim is treating information as a top-level tag by now and it simply keeps tourism=information as the top-level tag, when information is missing.
Echoing @alan_gr, I do worry about the inherent shift of meaning in the proposal away from touristic information. waymarkedtrails has shown information=guidepost for ages and so far there wasn’t any need to filter because the wiki page so far was clear about the reference to hiking/cycling/etc. route signage. Opening up the tagging for signage in prisons and nuclear power plants would certainly be surprising for me as a data user.
What about the other way around? Here is that query for IE + UK. There are some oddities in it - for example this cycleway, this track and thisremoved:tourism=information (presumably before this scheme can be accepted someone would need to edit that so that it said removed:information=).