Render names of attraction=animal

[geozeisig]

Expected behavior

Render names of attraction=animal in gray color. It should work for nodes and way-areas.

Actual behavior

As it is written on the wiki page you should add landuse tags like natural=grassland, sand etc. If you do so the names are written but in many different colors e.g. green, brown, yellow, blue (Example Berlin Zoo).
But there are cases where the enclosure consists of several areas of landuse or is a node and then does not appear.
If only one node is used, some mapper adds tourism=attraction (Example1, Example2). I think this is mapping for the renderer. tourism=attraction should only be used for very outstanding attractions. It is also not mentioned on the wiki page, to do so.

[HolgerJeromin]

FYI: tourism=attraction is ignored with a landuse (example, probably a tagging error, vs example) and shows the landuse color.

[Adamant36]

So, 10,000ish out of 11,000ish of them have the name tag. It would be interesting to know what percentage of those aren't just descriptive names, like "lion's den", and how many are official. My guess is a lot are probably descriptive.

[imagico]

I am inclined to close this because all of the shown examples (and probably a large fraction of the cases in the database in total) are misuse of the name tag to assign descriptions - which in addition do not even apply to the feature mapped itself but the animals occupying it, this: https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/551946684 is utter nonsense in tagging.

If a proper tagging is being established and practically used for this (species or taxon come to mind) we could consider rendering that. But name should be reserved for individual identifiers and we should not support uses for other purposes.

As far as generic rendering of tourism=attraction is concerned - current state is explained in #1257 (comment), we have reduced priority of this in #3603 and might consider dropping this completely - the examples here showing how rendering name tags for these incentivizes abuse of names for description labels are a good argument for that.

[geozeisig]

In 99% of cases, name is used instead of species. The tag species seems more fitting, but spontaneously a large majority would choose name. The pet name can not be determined in many cases and is not relevant for OSM. Since there are already over 10k uses, it is certainly not possible to change the tagging.

[matkoniecz]

it is certainly not possible to change the tagging

It is entirely possible to do that, even with assumption that no automatic edits would be made. Tagging schemes that are considered broken with significantly more use are routinely deprecated.

A bit stronger argument is that almost all tagged enclosures are using names in this way.

BTW, there is currently a discussion on tagging on what the proper tagging would be in this situation. At this moment nobody claimed that name tagging would be correct in such situation.

[Adamant36]

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2019-May/045090.html

Switching to something like species would probably be totally doable and if incouraged going forward would at least stop the problem from inflating more.

[kocio-pl]

I think that name is hard to replace, for example "wild cats", "big apes" or "water birds" (real examples from Warsaw ZOO) is not a species or species complex (taxon), but is a proper name. Also the name is easily observable. Latin or English names (animal=Gorilla) are good for database manipulations, but that is not what I would expect to see as a map label in Poland.

[geozeisig]

If the adding of landuse is rejected ( @matkoniecz changed the wiki page like this) we should expand the issue with the following:
Render a way-area tagged with attraction=animal in color for example greenish.

[matkoniecz]

The problem with attraction=animal tagging is that it misuses name tags.

I see no value in promoting it until the tagging scheme is fixed (I unfortunately have no good idea how to tag this kind of information).

[Tomasz-W]

I also noticed that animal area mapped with landcover tag (because they both have the same oultine, so it makes no sense to draw two separate polygons) has different label than rest of the zoo:

https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=18/52.39947/17.00824
https://www.openstreetmap.org/#map=19/52.40797/16.90541

[matkoniecz]

@Tomasz-W

See second comment, by @HolgerJeromin ( #3775 (comment) )

[kocio-pl]

The problem with attraction=animal tagging is that it misuses name tags.

What do you think about memorial name for example, like "John Doe" or "Statue of Jane Doe"? Seems to me like a similar approach - while it can be tagged with "person=John Doe" for technical reasons, using the name is common and non-controversial.

[jeisenbe]

The discussion for a couple months back at the Tagging list did not provide a way to tag these features instead of using name.

It looks like there isn't support for rendering name=* with attraction=animal as now used, because many of the examples are not the names of the enclosure or area, but a description of the type of animal. While this may sometimes be the official name for the area, often it's not.

Unfortunately, the lack of name rendering has encouraged mappers to add landcover features such as landuse=meadow or natural=sand which do render name labels. This is also misleading, because the name in this case is not the name of a meadow, or pasture, or sand dune, but the name of a zoo enclosure.

Attraction=animal usage has increased from 9k to 12k in the past year.

Is it better to continue not supporting attraction=animal ?

[Elefant-aus-Wuppertal]

I personally do not really get what's wrong with tagging attraction=animal with the name of the animal itself. As it is not only widespread but also accepted/non-controversial it seems to be no problem for me. If we want to draw a text label for attraction=animal at all, which I would support very likely, then my propose would be to exclude all attraction=animal areas that have a natural=* or a landuse=* key. In zoos etc., attraction=animal usually should get an own area so or so I see, because often there is an indoor and an outdoor part of the enclosure. We should encourage that attraction=animal gets not used with landuse or natural at all, that's why my purpose is the exclusion of these areas.

In the other way, I don't know whether it would be possible to exclude natural and landuse areas with attraction=animal from text rendering? Because concerning the name is not cleraly for what it is?

[jeisenbe]

[is it] possible to exclude natural and landuse areas with attraction=animal from text rendering?

While this is technically possible, it would not be a good idea, since mappers would be confused why the landuse=* or natural=* area was not rendering. Normally, adding another tag does not make a feature disappear.

[jeisenbe]

Also, this feature is not currently imported as a polygon when mapped as a closed way, so it is not feasible to render attraction=animal or other attraction=* areas until after the next database reload. We just did this in v5.0.0, so probably this will be another year.

[Elefant-aus-Wuppertal]

Oh, I see. Okay, time to see how we can going on in this, I think. In my opinion there's need to differentiate natural=* and landuse=* cleraly from attraction=animal, otherwise there will be no chance to render because it will get weird. But I don't know ho to do that actually, if the renderer does not exclude some combinations.

[geozeisig]

natural=* and landuse=* is only used to get this tag rendered. It is a tagging for the renderer. We should not make exceptions for natural=* and landuse=*. It would be good if all names were rendered evenly in gray.
If the area were also rendered in a color, for example greenish, that would also be good. Or do we need another issue for this?

[Elefant-aus-Wuppertal]

I concluse that attraction=animal should not get any landuse/natural tag at all in the normal case when tagging for the renderer would not be present/would not work?