At the time of writing this post, sport=rugby had just shy of 3000 uses, while sport=rugby_union had over 7600 and sport=rugby_league had just over 2100. Tag history graph.
Upon being challenged, the user in question replied they were following the wiki page for sport=rugby, which in my opinion is quite strongly written in order to discourage the use of sport=rugby_union and sport=rugby_league. The talk page for sport=rugby indicates that that tag had more use prior to the more specific sport=rugby_union and sport=rugby_league gaining ground, although let’s bear in mind that this discussion is nearing on 14 years old.
sport=rugby_union and sport=rugby_league are not deprecated tags either.
Rugby really only has the two codes (Union and League - other variants like Sevens come from one of those codes), and to me it doesn’t make much sense to separate these out into minor tags - to me it’s just conveying the same information but with extra steps. The unique benefit of sport=rugby is when there’s uncertainty about the code of rugby being tagged, however in most cases the code should be obvious to anyone familiar with rugby and where it’s being played (perhaps I’m biased here being in Wales where Rugby Union is by far the more popular code and also our national sport!)
As far as I’m aware, none of these changes were recently discussed in either Italy or the UK (or anywhere else for that matter).
Personally I prefer separate sport=rugby_union and sport=rugby_league - they are distinct enough to be tagged as separate sports.
In addition: the tag rugby | Keys | OpenStreetMap Taginfo was only used 200 times before this retagging was started. This clearly qualifies as a mass edit, and should in my opinion be reverted until a proper discussion can take place about its merits/impact.
In the meantime, I think the https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:sport%3Drugby page should be rewritten to reflect the current de-facto usage of sport=rugby_union, rather than labelling sport=rugby_union as “not recommended” and instructing users to use the “superior” sport=rugby tag. 7600 uses of sport=rugby_union compared to 188 uses of rugby=union clearly represents a strong community consensus that has been established over a number of years.
I have also linked to this forum thread in the comments of one of the changesets concerned.
There is the revert tool https://revert.monicz.dev/ but when I checked again this morning, the same user had made more edits in France (example) and Ireland.
I’ve only used the tool once so I don’t feel confident using it to revert so many changesets
A DWG ticket has been raised for this; we’ll have a look (the perl revert scripts should deal with it).
On the related issue of public overpass servers being unusable, I’ve noticed problems, and for ad-hoc queries have just used something else instead, but that likely wouldn’t work here.
Is anyone aware of an Overpass server that is designed for public use and has usage controlled so that the scrapers are kept away?
Isn’t it the “… and has usage controlled” bit that is causing the problem?
I suspect the way forward is going to be private instances for any kind of service that needs reliable Overpass access (see the osm.org query function). The surprising thing is more that the public Overpass instances have been able to stave off collapse for so long, xapi anybody?