Talk:Key:year of construction

How to replace this tag?

Using this tag is discouraged, use start_date=* instead.

Well. But how? I have a top secret underground semi-military bunker constructed from 1952 to 1963 and it was never inaugurated. :-) I would record this data. start_date=* seems not to be adequate. --Kogutowicz Manó (talk) 19:32, 13 March 2023 (UTC)

I'm not sure how accurate that suggestion is but you can go with construction_date:edtf=*. The only difference between `year_of_construction` and `construction_date` is that the first one supports EDTF format, while the second doesn't. Dimitar155 (talk) 21:24, 17 July 2023 (UTC)

deprecated?

On what basis was this considered to be deprecated on 16 January 2023? @Something B:

I'm not in favor of this key but it is in use noticeably (tag history) and I can't find a consensus of deprecating it. --Chris2map (talk) 18:33, 28 May 2023 (UTC)

There's currently some odd 38,000 uses of construction_date. Maybe it has something to do with that. --Adamant1 (talk) 14:28, 28 July 2023 (UTC)

I am in favor of marking as "deprecated", because no one has pointed out the difference between this key and start_date. Rather, start_date is a moment in time, a specific day, or if unknown, a month and a year, or a year, or a century. And year_of_construction would indicate that you need to specify there the years of construction, not completion, of the object. Some buildings take several years to build. I think this tag is a duplicate and should be replaced by start_date. maro21 14:32, 5 August 2023 (UTC)

At least the way I've always understand it start_date is more to do with something like a business started. Whereas, year_of_construction and/or construction_date is more to do with when a building is built. They aren't really analogous though. Like a business isn't constructed and a building doesn't have a start date. So at least IMO this and construction_date shouldn't be replaced by start_date. Although there should only be a single tag for when a building was built. Although you are correct that buildings can be built over multiple years, but I don't think means anything about if the tags are useable or not on their own since most people just pick either the first or last years of construction, whichever is in the news or whatever. I don't think it really matters if someone says the year of construction for a building was 1964 if that's what it says in the news at the time and it turns out the last curtain was hung in January of 1965. The building was still constructed in 1964. --Adamant1 (talk) 20:11, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

"year_of_construction and/or construction_date is more to do with when a building is built" - I think such information isn't really useful on OSM. Yes, OSM is also a database, but such things are usually not written anywhere. Only approximate. Start_date is indeed mostly use for POIs because such day of opening is usually announced. For buildings I use start_date as a last year of construction - when such building started existence. maro21 20:51, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

"I think such information isn't really useful on OSM.....such things are usually not written anywhere. Only approximate." That kind of information is actually pretty readily available from reliable sources like history books, plaques, websites, the actual object Etc. Etc. If you want an example I've used the tag with fire hydrants around my area that have the year they were constructed written on them and Start_date wouldn't work in that situation. Regardless, No one is using the tag just by guessing when the Object was constructed. And usefulness is subjective. I know it's been useful to me where I've used it around my local area.

It's not like you couldn't say the same thing for start_date though. What actual purpose does tagging when a business first opened serve and how are people going to figure that information out anyway? In the meantime using start_date on a building is just nonsensical because when it "started" could mean anything from when the first brick was laid to when they opened it to the public. If your point is to map when it first opened to the public then probably open_date=* would be better. Otherwise year_of_construction is way less ambagious. The good thing with both those tags BTW is that you can use them together on the same object, but you can't really do that with start_date. --Adamant1 (talk) 23:16, 6 August 2023 (UTC)

So I assume you don't want to deprecate this tag and you think that year_of_construction and start_date have different meaning? maro21 10:40, 2 September 2023 (UTC)

Software that uses this tag

Does anyone know if there is any software or maps out there that use this or constraction_date somehow? --Adamant1 (talk) 14:31, 28 July 2023 (UTC)