Proposal talk:Top-level information tag

Why keep tourism=information?

I welcome this proposal to start a transition to information=* as a main tag, but I think it would be more straightforward to deprecate tourism=information rather than keep it as a fallback for potentially “forgotten” information types. A generic information feature could be tagged as information=yes. —-Dieterdreist (talk) 07:15, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

I agree with this and welcome this proposal. However, I think the wiki discussion fell out of fashion and one gets more feedback on the forum. —Preceding unsigned comment added by Supsup (talk • contribs) 13:56, 3 December 2024‎

Good point. I have added the tourism=information deprecation and recommend information=yes for generic features instead. Quincylvania (talk) 01:02, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

Retagging

There are nearly 30k information=office. What is the intended procedure to retag them to tourism=office? --Hufkratzer (talk) 19:49, 18 October 2024 (UTC)

"tourism=office replaces tourism=information + information=office" - it may be better to keep this one, the same for =visitor_centre. Such major deprecation will bring many protests and break many data consumers Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 04:00, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

Lol I added this part after someone on slack had the opposite take, that there's not much advantage in redefining without improving. By deprecating just two tags then `tourism` is well-defined as a facility (a POI you would expect to see marked on a map) while `information` is well-defined as a piece of physical infrastructure. This isn't about aesthetics, it's about making it easy for data consumers to handle OSM data by removing special cases. The change would only affect about 30,000 features, which may have been a lot ten years ago but it's not very many by modern OSM standards. Quincylvania (talk) 14:54, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Tagging proposals don't have an enforcement mechanism. Any large-scale retagging would need to go through the automated edit review process. The advantage of getting a tagging proposal approved is that the documentation can be updated and that apps and local mappers can start using the new tagging as desired. Quincylvania (talk) 14:54, 4 November 2024 (UTC)

Similar

As I understand, dropping man_made=advertising and changing advertising=* to primary tag was a similar good change Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 04:01, 25 October 2024 (UTC)

Where and how was man_made=advertising dropped? It is still used and growing in numbers. --Hufkratzer (talk) 12:33, 2 December 2024 (UTC)

Some examples:

• amenity=shop -> shop=*
• amenity=club -> club=*
• amenity=office -> office=*

Something B (talk) 15:42, 28 February 2025 (UTC)

information=office/visitor_centre

Maybe office=information and office=visitor_centre is more appropriate tags. Something B (talk) 15:46, 28 February 2025 (UTC)

Interesting thought, but I think it's better to keep the association with tourism here. Quincylvania (talk) 01:04, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

tourism=visitor_centre is good, but tourism=office is ambiguous - travel or guide agencies also is "touristic offices". Something B (talk) 08:04, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

Good point, I changed the proposed replacement tag to be tourism=information_office. It's a little verbose but it's unambiguous and matches the term for these in British English. Quincylvania (talk) 17:50, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

What's the scope of updating data consumers?

From a high level of keeping tags organized and making sense, I like the idea of this proposal. But I think it needs a bit more research around (or maybe just more documenting) current data consumers and if they're on board with making any needed changes. The proposal just says "renderers may need to be updated to expect the new tagging" and that sounds like it could be a rather broad set of projects. There are a lot of projects listed using tourism=information on Taginfo, for instance. If this proposal passes and tourism=information becomes "deprecated", will mappers still need to be including it for the foreseeable future until most data consumers stop looking at it? Maybe there aren't many that care about it as a "top-level tag", or maybe there are a lot, and I just don't know the scope of what would need to change and if it would make consumers' lives more difficult. --PeterCooperJr (talk) 12:44, 27 March 2025 (UTC)

It would be pretty difficult to do a comprehensive survey of how everyone is using a specific tag and how willing they are to adapt (especially since a lot of OSM apps are closed source). OSM consumers know that tagging sometimes changes and that their apps will need periodic updates. I'd say this is a pretty minor change for apps to adopt, and information features are pretty low prominence anyway. The change will also be gradual, as people slowly start using the new tagging pattern. The end goal is to have the data be easier to consume, so apps will have fewer data exceptions to encode in their apps (like signposts being altogether different from hotels). Quincylvania (talk) 18:48, 27 March 2025 (UTC)