Greetings.
Voting has started for Tagging scheme for windmills and watermills:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposal:Tagging_scheme_for_windmills_and_watermills
Unfortunately, that proposal still doesn’t make any sense on a number of levels:
- It seems to suggest retagging windpumps as windmills(!)**
- Suggests a “rendering” for these tags. This makes no sense in a tagging proposal
- Completely ignores the
historictags also used in this space.
I believe that existing OSM tags can be used to display windmills and watermills as “in use now” or “in use previously”. Any proposal to change how windmills and watermills are tagged needs to ensure that all cases are covered, including lifecycle and current status (e.g. as a museum).
** or is at least capable of being misunderstood to do that.
1 Like
Did you bother to read the discussions that brought us to this voting, mainly in this forum, where it is explained why windpumps should be retagged?
Rendering suggestion is part of the proposal process. I advise you to read:
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposal_process
Anyway, why should that be a problem?
About historic tag, why should it be mentioned in this proposal? The historic scheme is well defined and this proposal doesn’t change or affects any of it. you can add whatever you want to the historic, and besides, there are many mappers in the OSM community against the use of the historic scheme to denote “old things”. Historic should be something verifiable, where something important happened, not to use arbitrarily to tag old or antique things.
Yes
This post was fundamentally flawed in that it correlated a building type with a building function (current or historic). The post you quote got 7 downvotes and 2 upvotes, but I’m guessing you were actually trying to link further down the thread?
There, this post of yours seems entirely sensible - I’m not sure how we got from there to the current “proposal” which is something completely different?
Edit: Spelling
I’m sorry, but I’m not going to debate this now when the voting is on, especially not here. Anyway, I’m not talking about a specific post. The entire topic is conclusive about the direction of the discussion and why the proposal is the way it is.
The reason to propose the deprecation of man_made=windpump in favour of man:made=windmill + windmill:function=waterpump has elaborately been discussed in the original topic Deprecate man_made=windmill (as from around #60) because in large parts of the world where these windpumps are common (US, Oz, Spain) the common name for them is simply “windmill” and nothing else. There was not much objection during this discussion so it is a bit surprising that this issue comes up once again after voting started.
Rendering is just a side effect and has nothing tho do with the proposal for a structured tagging of wind- and watermills.
“Historic” is a different issue and a mess if you look at the hawker’s tray filled with values for this key. Anything can be “historc” so I would not bother about that. If once there is some kind of structured tagging for mills the next step could be to try to sort the “historic” issue if someone cares to do so.
1 Like
The proposal was rejected with 10 yes, 9 no and 2 abstentions.
Since the main point against the proposal was the tagging change in man_made=windpump, it is possible that the proposal will change to exclude that suggestion.
1 Like
Interesting result. I am quite sure most participants who rejected that change are from countries where such mills are not in use and are not aware that they are commonly called windmill where they are in use.
Even when searching the internet one can find bulks of photos describing these structures as windmill or windmill driven water pump or windmill water well, as one can already see in the descriptive links to some examples:
windpump is definitely not wrong but apparently windmill is more common in use. Anyhow i would appreciate …
The windmill driven water pumps can still be discussed in a separate topic once the proposal has been accepted without that detail.
I don’t know, but I know the current situation is not the result of uncoordinated tag growth but is the result of previous discussion on the topic, you can likely find it in the archive.
Curiously, even the original name of the patent is windmill, not windpump:
I have not searched for previous discussions or proposals as that would not change the facts. In the US, Oz and NZ, where lots and lots of these windmill driven pumps were installed and still operated until today they are commonly called windmill.
People of other countries, mainly in northern Europe, who are not familar with these devices will probably check Wikipedia or other sources and go for windpump. And yes, these structures are wind driven pumps but nevertheless the more common name for them is windmill.
There are 12000 man_made=windmill and 4000 man_made=windpump. If you check the geographic distribution you will find a reasonable share of those 12000 windmills in the US, Oz, Nz, South America, Southern Europe and Africa. If you continue checking the details you will find out, that most of these man_made=windmill are windmill driven waterpumps.
I did not check and count in detail, but I would place a bet that more than 50% of the actually tagged man_made=windmill are windmill driven waterpums in reality.
From that point of view it would surely make sense, to deprecate man_made=windpump and go ahead with the more common man_made=windmill instead.
1 Like
So - let me get this straight - you’ve noticed that some mappers mistag things that are actually wind pumps in the real world for windmills, and your proposed solution is to pretend that real world wind pumps are actually windmills?
Have you thought of applying for a management consultancy job on the B Ark?
1 Like
No, I noticed that in large part of the world these structures are called windmill driven waterpumps or simply windmill by people who are native english speakers. Also the patent papers for those windmill pumps call them simply windmill. Some other people (apparently less in quantity) call them windpump. That’s fine with me, but I proposed to use the more common term, that’s all.
Following the windpump approach as only legitimate solution a wind driven saw should be named windsaw but in fact it is called sawmill. Would you blame someone for calling such a facility sawmill instead of windsaw?
Btw. I am not looking for any management consultancy job, I am happy with what I am doing and I do not really understand what that has to do with the issue … 
Sorry if this has been brought up already, but perhaps updating editor presets is more likely to meet with success?
E.g. in non-European regions we could have presets:
- Windmill (for pumping water) =
man_made=windpump - Windmill (for grinding grain) =
man_made=windmill
A bit wordy, but it should stem the tide of Australians/Americans/etc mistagging these things (myself included!).
1 Like
iD does that already. When you enter wind … you will be offered several presets to choose from
even including icons for better understanding. So the “mistagging” cannot be caused by iD at least … 
1 Like
If someone doesn’t know what a windpump is and they’re searching for “windmill”, surely they’ll pick the “windmill” result?
Also searching for “windmill” in the GoMap editor doesn’t return the windpump preset at all (despite it using the iD presets). Maybe that’s a bug or limitation in the editor though.
This may happen for sure but if that someone has a look at the search results popping up for “wind…” already before finishing typing “windmill” they may also recognize the “windpump” icon as the object they are searching for.
I don’t know about other editors but at least iD does a good job here imo.
Nevertheless the visual support does not entirely solve the definition problem because there are lots of windmills looking like
in reality and not constructed anyhow to mill grain or the like but to pump water. These are definitely “windpumps” but everyone who is not an expert will surely map those as “windmill” again.
Thinking pragmatically the use of windmill as generic tag for all such kind of objects and adding windmill:function=water_pump for those designed to pump water is not such a stupid idea at all.
Btw. are we not doing the same with other objects? We are tagging barrier=fence + fence_type=railing although a railing is definitely not a fence and there was the (correct) tag barrier=railing earlier which became deprecated in favour of the present tagging.