Talk:Tag:residential=halting site

How it differs from tourism=caravan_site? Length of stay? Being main place of residence? No substantial difference? Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 11:38, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

Yes, mostly being a main place of residence. It's not tourism. --JeroenHoek (talk) 11:52, 25 March 2021 (UTC)

residential=halting_site goes against the definition of what a residence stands for. A traveller is a person travelling, moving from a location to another one either temporarily or forever, then called nomads. Nomads do not have a residence by definition, they travel, it's a way of living. In both cases the person does not reside in that area. I agree it is not tourism but it is neither residential, it is rather a service of accommodations given by an operator. --SHARCRASH (talk) 14:38, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

Cyrille37 replying here to your comment from the key's discussion page...

When you say that "travellers are not nomads" it is such a paradox, so contradictory. Sorry, I don't think it is OK to interpret differently language foundations such as definitions. "Gens du voyage" is a specific French term or even legal status if i'm not wrong but i'm not from France. After all, they live in mobile homes for that reason. Even if some of them decide to settle down, they still live in mobile homes prone to leave whenever they want and among other nomads. Also "seasonal" by definition is a particular time in the year and therefore temporary or fluctuating. Again, Nomads do not have a residence by definition, they travel, it's a way of living. I agree it is not tourism but it is not residential either, it is rather a service of accommodations given by an operator as you said. At least on this we can agree. --SHARCRASH (talk) 15:48, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

They live in mobile homes because that is part of their cultural heritage. Sometimes these mobile homes cannot even be moved without substantial preparations, a crane to lift it, and a special type of trailer to move the thing with. This type of residential living is not as free as the gipsies of the past did; there is registration with the local municipality and all the general requirements of long term residency. It is really a different beast from tourism. But the heart of the matter is that it doesn't really matter how long they stay. People live their lives in these areas, and its primary landuse is domiciliary, which makes it residential by definition — although a special subclass of landuse=residential.

You can compare it with short-stay accommodations for expats and other workers where you rent a furnished apartment for several months or a few years. Or even off-campus student housing; to name another example. It's still residential use (as opposed to a hotel) because you usually have to register with the local municipality and officially live there, but not as permanent as (long term) renting or buying a house. --JeroenHoek (talk) 16:19, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

I understand that there is a paradox with this tag. Like JeroenHoek say, it mostly being a main place of residence.

* In France to live some months in a "residential halting_site" you have to prove that you are a "traveller / nomad" because it it an official citizen status. Other citizen cannot come to live in those places, even if they have a caravan.

* In France again (sorry), dedicated school teachers and government social agent are visiting people in this residential places. Also the is a superintendent for each of this place and a 7/7 days phone number.

* So I'm really open to change the tag, but I would not agree to associate it with "tourism". Sorry, I have not any proposal for replacement. Are you ?

--Cyrille37 (talk) 16:12, 28 April 2021 (UTC)

I was unaware of this tag, and I'm not sure the name perfectly suits the general meaning of "halting sites" which may be customary and not designated by local authorities. In the UK I have general used residential=travellers_site. SK53 (talk) 12:36, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

In a UK context, Damian Le Bas, a well-educated man of Gypsy heritage, wrote a book recently about "The Stopping Places. There are several articles about him which are worth a read, one example.

Specificity

I was first made aware of this tag and this article when discussing ways to tag trailer parks with another American. Trailer parks (or as I call them in my regional dialect, mobile home parks) are an incredibly common feature on the American landscape, so an important thing to have a tag for. For lack of a documented tag, people have come up with various ad-hoc tags for trailer parks. (I've been using residential=mobile for years as part of GNIS import cleanup.)

Unfortunately, some have come upon residential=halting_site while looking for an appropriate tag in the absence of the residential=trailer_park article I just wrote. I'm quite certain there are no halting sites in the intended sense in the United States, yet as of writing, 10 halting sites have been tagged in the U.S. [1][2] They're probably all trailer parks. To an American unfamiliar with Travellers and associated cultural practices, the article as I found it, especially the infobox, really made it seem like OSM had come up with a novel term for American-style trailer parks but decided to use as many offensive racial slurs in as many languages as possible when defining a trailer park. Not good.

It was only after discussing this article with a European more familiar with the social context that I realized the term "halting site" is actually a real English term, not specific to the OpenStreetMappian dialect of English, and that it would reasonably be tied to an ethnic group. Still, the inclusion of all the possible names for Travellers seems gratuitous. I added a link to Wikipedia's article on halting sites, which is more complete than this wiki could ever hope to be, and I thank JeroenHoek and Amᵃᵖanda for cleaning up the grammar. But can we sidestep this edit war over which colloquial labels to apply to the ethnic groups who live at halting sites? Why not just say it's for Travellers (or other formal, nonoffensive terms) and insist that readers go to Wikipedia for a full, nuanced definition? If someone is so unfamiliar with halting sites that they can't find this article by searching for either "halting site" or "Traveller" and can only find it using a disrespectful term, maybe they should simply tag the feature as a named landuse=residential area and leave it to others to refine it as residential=halting_site if warranted. There are lots of disrespectful terms for the inhabitants of trailer parks, too, but we don't need to include them in a basic definition.

 – Minh Nguyễn ^💬 21:04, 27 July 2021 (UTC)

What I object to is being too politically correct to the detriment of clarity. We're not using racial slurs here, and any terms that some might find pejorative have been labelled as such. Completeness in our technical documentation is useful not just because there are different names for Travellers. This is a varied group of people that share their way of living as a common denominator, but there is not one ethnicity or name that can be used to describe it. Bear in mind that not every Roma gipsy would call themselves Traveller; i.e., Travellers is not a catch-all name for this group. In the Netherlands they refer to the group as a whole as present here as 'Sinti, Roma, and Travellers', in other European countries it varies too. For OSM, what matter is that mappers can find and correctly use this sub-type of residential land use. If you don't use the word most commonly known to mappers worldwide ('gipsy', which is not a racial slur, but a moniker used by many of this group themselves) you get confusion and mistagging.

Disambiguating this tag from residential=trailer_park sounds good. It is a different thing although there are similarities (the mobile aspect). --JeroenHoek (talk) 06:51, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

@JeroenHoek: For such a short article, it seemed to emphasize the terms over everything else. I appreciate Mateusz Konieczny's constructive edits, which give the impression that the comprehensive list of terms is essentially a footnote rather than the main thrust of the article. – Minh Nguyễn ^💬 01:28, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

Hi Minh, Are you aware of residential=mobile_home_park the gb-en equivalent of trailer park? I have certainly been using that tag for a number of years. These locations tend to be quite closely regulated in E&W law (as indeed are traveller's sites), with the typical properties being known as "park homes" in the trade. In practice these are not actually mobile, but as structures have a fairly short life time. SK53 (talk) 20:40, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

@SK53: Thanks, I added it to Tag:residential=trailer_park as another synonym, albeit the least common one that I've come across so far. It happens to match the term I personally use in conversation, but I've always shied away from it because the other tags are so much more popular. – Minh Nguyễn ^💬 01:28, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

@Minh Nguyen: My fault for not documenting it perhaps. In en-gb trailer may be more typically associated with truck trailers, although it is in use by travelling showpeople (see below) in the UK. The additional complication here in the UK, and probably elsewhere, are static caravan sites, which in aerial imagery look very like mobile home parks, but are actually tourism caravan sites, but where the caravan is left permanently. The clear difference is that residential usage year-round is not permitted at such locations. The problem is that these caravan sites often do not take touring caravans, and I'm not sure if we tag these. In other words there are several features which will look quite similar, but in practice will need different tagging. This is the UK Government's summary relating to mobile homes, you'll note that sites need to be licenced, presumably by the local authority. SK53 (talk) 16:09, 29 July 2021 (UTC)

@SK53: Tag:residential=trailer_park documents existing usage of that tag, which is clearly dominated by what we both call mobile home parks and which, for better or worse, is orders of magnitude more common than residential=mobile_home_park. At this point, I personally don't think it's worth trying to migrate all that existing usage from a reasonably correct term over to a term that perhaps is slightly less ambiguous. But if you want to formally propose residential=mobile_home_park, I'd vote for the proposal. "Trailer" often means a truck trailer in American English, too, but I don't think we need worry much about people accidentally using it for parks given over to truck trailers. On the other hand, in Australian English, "caravan park" is apparently quite ambiguous, meaning either tourism=caravan_site or residential=trailer_park. – Minh Nguyễn ^💬 09:45, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

@Minh Nguyen: My stated views on changing widely used tags to something less widely used would conflict with these notions. Although I do accept that trailer_park is common usage and likely to remain so, I'll continue to point out it's demerits :-). I also regard the proposal process as on the whole a bad thing for tagging, and something which can be at least as detrimental as editor maintainer decisions or worse, so I try & avoid too much interaction with it. Often though semantic issues related to meaning of trailer may come back to bite us (see US usage of landuse=recreation_ground which is very different from UK usage: mainly because most of us have a good idea of what a "rec" would look like). Problems of this sort, different terminology in english speaking countries, are often not caught at early stages of tag usage (see above my doubts about using halting_site because it may be interpreted as traditional sites rather than formal ones). Any way let's close this off for now. SK53 (talk) 10:41, 30 July 2021 (UTC)

Travelling Showpeople

In the UK a lot of local authorities also distinguish between travellers sites (equivalent to the definition here of halting site) and travelling showpeoples yards. The latter group may or may not be of ethnicities associated with the former class of sites, but the yards are rather different being required to also accommodate fairground equipment (mainly in the winter season) as well as living trailers. Here is one such which I surveyed 253992537 253992537, but lacking a detailed subtag I just added a note. There's quite a large one in Nottingham, but I'm not sure to what extent it's a residential area or something more akin to a depot. SK53 (talk) 21:04, 28 July 2021 (UTC)

Trolltag

A place is either a halting site or a residential area, if it is permanent it is residential otherwise it is not. Some of the terms in use are probably euphemisms that we should not copy, if the people are moving they need a halting site, if they don’t it is a residential area. —Dieterdreist (talk) 09:40, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

I'm sure that this is the case in some localities. In the Netherlands a woonwagenkamp has a very specific meaning both culturally and practically though (cf. https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Woonwagenkamp). The houses are essentially and legally mobile, despite being placed for years on end (hence the residential aspect). Data consumers can simple ignore this tag if they are only interested in the general scope of residential areas: landuse=residential is required, and like other residential=* values, this just narrows down the type of residential area. This way of living is a Unesco protected cultural heritage; it might be a bit culturally insensitive to dismiss this type of residential zoning as 'troll-tagging'. --JeroenHoek (talk) 09:54, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean. In Ireland, “halting site“ refers to a specific type of facility, often quite permanent, with people possibly living there for many years. You may think that is an illogical name, or not, but these are physical, real world things, and this is the term used for them. Amᵃᵖanda (talk) 12:15, 2 March 2023 (UTC)

Yes, to me it seems an euphemism, when these places are actually residential areas with people living there for an indefinite time I think they are trailer parks. I would see it as an act of hostility to call them halting site because this seems to imply re-departing (or maybe I am misguided?). At least the wiki says the tag residential=halting_site should be used for Residential area specifically designated for caravans used by traveling people without permanent living place. so it cannot apply to places where people permanently live. Or maybe people are de-facto living there permanently until now, but could be sent away at any time, so it is not permanently? Btw., there is also a general issue here with the term "designated" in the context of landuse, where we look at actual current use, not the designated use. --Dieterdreist (talk) 12:55, 3 March 2023 (UTC)

Here's an example of an Irish city/local government using the term “Halting Site”: Dublin City Council. “Halting Sites”. https://www.dublincity.ie/residential/housing/traveller-accommodation/halting-sites. . Amᵃᵖanda (talk) 14:14, 3 March 2023 (UTC)