Hi all, We currently use British English for almost all OSM tags. Jewellery shops however are typically tagged with the American English variant shop=jewelry (20083 occurrences), and hardly ever with the British English variant shop=jewellery (187 occurrences). Editors and data consumers only support the American variant.
Some mappers have proposed switching to the British English version. I'm not sure if that's really is a good idea. It wouldn't be an easy task, as it would require synchronisation between mappers, editors and data consumers. The gain would be fairly minor and the disadvantages rather large: all data consumers that handle jewellery shops would be required to update their code. On the other hand, maybe it makes sense to try anyway. If we decide to accept the tag shop=jewellery and mark shop=jewelry as discouraged, we should have at least a good plan. Without plan, nothing will happen, as mappers don't want to use unsupported tags, and data consumers don't want to support unused tags. Of course we can't decide what editors/data consumers should do. However, we could come up with a recommendation, and hope editors/data consumers are willing to follow it. An example plan/procedure could look as follows: Editors: - The first 6 months after acceptance of the proposal to switch, editors should keep producing the old tag shop=jewelry only. This gives data consumers time to make arrangements to support the new tag. - The following 3 months, editors might either produce shop=jewelry or shop=jewellery. - After 9 months from acceptance of the proposal, editors should only produce shop=jewellery. Data consumers: - Within 6 months after the acceptance of the proposal, data consumers should accept shop=jewellery in addition to shop=jewelry. - When usage of shop=jewelry has declined sufficiently, data consumers can stop supporting shop=jewelry. This is not expected within 12 months after acceptance of the proposal, and likely much later. Data: - The first 6 months after acceptance of the proposal, the data should remain unchanged. - After 6 months, the amount of shop=jewelry tags is expected to decline in favour of shop=jewellery tags. It is hard to predict how long this process will take. Wiki: - 6 months after the acceptance of the proposal, shop=jewellery should be marked as recommended tag. - 9 months after the acceptance of the proposal, shop=jewelry should be marked as discouraged. As you can see, this is not a simple proposal. There are also some risks involved, for example because it is unclear whether data consumers and editors would be willing to follow the recommendations. All in all, it is a fairly large operation for a relatively small improvement, and I'm not sure if it's worth it. I wonder though what other mappers think. Would it make sense to switch the recommended tag to shop=jewellery? And if we do so, would a plan similarly to the one above make sense? (Please note that I'm writing this on personal title and not as maintainer of the openstreetmap-carto stylesheet.) -- Matthijs _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
