Talk:Mosque

building=mosque for use, not fabric

Proposal

Tag building=mosque should represent the use, not the original purpose or construction type.

Tag building_type=mosque should represent the original purpose / construction type.

Rationale

1. The current doctrine (building=mosque means building built as a mosque) is so counter-intuitive that I think it won't survive the gut feelings of mappers in the long run. (At the moment mosques aren't well mapped, at least in the formerly Christian-majority European countries I'm familiar with.)

2. For places of worship, it would be better to privilege cultural use of buildings over their physical fabric: there's nothing more deeply cultural than religion.

3. building_type=* seems much better suited to what building=mosque is doing currently.

Examples

At least in Europe, there are several cases where the current doctrine looks difficult to sustain.

Worthing Mosque

OSM | photos (page down) A converted commercial/industrial building in Worthing, UK. It seems to me more rational that it can be tagged building=mosque than building=commercial. This would be consistent with buildings like this office building converted into apartments, which I changed (I believe correctly) from building=commercial to building=apartments when its use changed.

Mezquita-Catedral de Córdoba, Spain

OSM Wikipedia Currently the whole of the former mosque prayer hall is tagged as a Christian church (probably wrongly). Until my edit of 3 days ago, it was also tagged building=church: I can see the sense of that, but going by the wiki it is a building=mosque. Afaik Muslims can't pray there (at least not legally) and haven't been able to for several centuries. In Spain especially, and even more at that particular site, there is likely to be big cultural resistance to calling it a building=mosque, whatever the wiki says (hence my note on the edit).

Mezquita Cristo de la Luz, Toledo, Spain

OSM Wikipedia The square part was built as a mosque, the semi-circular apse was added when it was converted to a church. It's currently tagged building=church, but should probably be building=mosque (or perhaps the two parts should be split). But building=church seems perfectly intuitive.

Brick Lane Mosque, London, UK

OSM Flikr By the doctrine, this ought to be building=church. But between its original purpose and current use, it's also been a synagogue. Again, building=church seems so counter-intuitive the doctrine should be abandoned.

Other considerations

Obviously this interlinks with building=church, etc. I think the same applies: this building OSM Google StreetView was built as a church, but is now a house. It can't have building=church;house. Much better would be building=house + building_type=church.

@Tigerfell: often has useful comments? Possibly there's a better place for this discussion than here?

eteb3 (talk) 12:32, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

"For places of worship, it would be better to privilege cultural use of buildings over their physical fabric" - you map place of worship with amenity=place_of_worship. Also, if you want to map building use then building:use=* exists already Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 13:06, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

https://www.google.com/maps/@52.5769545,-0.4128778,3a,75y,62.73h,90t/data=!3m7!1e1!3m5!1sC5pOXdI34zgwVNrxSIPaBQ!2e0!6shttps:%2F%2Fstreetviewpixels-pa.googleapis.com%2Fv1%2Fthumbnail%3Fpanoid%3DC5pOXdI34zgwVNrxSIPaBQ%26cb_client%3Dmaps_sv.tactile.gps%26w%3D203%26h%3D100%26yaw%3D49.696377%26pitch%3D0%26thumbfov%3D100!7i16384!8i8192 - that is case described at Church (building:use=apartments building=church). Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 13:09, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

Note that maybe editors like iD should show building:use=* more prominently? But that should be suggested at iD issue tracker Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 13:09, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for your comments. I agree with you that iD could do much better at suggesting better tags.

You've restated the current doctrine, which I'm aware of. I'm suggesting that building=* as original purpose is not intuitive, and in a great number of cases it's not coherent either (which I care more about).

Perhaps really I'm suggesting that building=* is deprecated altogether for places of worship, and we have instead building=yes + building:type=*. (imo building:use=* would only duplicate amenity=*)

I can't see any rational reason that building=* must refer to the physical fabric rather than what it "really" is in everyone's mind. The residential building in Wansford you linked would be better as building:type=church rather than building=church.

Could you explain how you'd deal with the apartments-from-offices building I mentioned by analogy? Would that really be building=commercial + building:use=apartments ? OSM Google Street View What about the mosques proper that I've mentioned?

eteb3 (talk) 14:32, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

"Perhaps really I'm suggesting that building=* is deprecated altogether for places of worship, and we have instead building=yes + building:type=*" - what exactly is benefit here? Making easier to tag for newbies can be achieved by improving editors (feel free to suggest improvements! noticeable part of them is accepted). Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 14:58, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

commercial-to-apartments: in this case it does not really have some strict office building architecture, I would be fine with building=commercial + building:use=residential and building=apartments Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 14:58, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

You are suggesting a major change in tagging for a specific use case, which IMO does not actually fit with how to map mosques. Virtually all mosques in the UK are adapted buildings (as indeed are many churches, gurdwaras, hindu temples etc.) with only a small number of purpose built ones (usually easy to recognise as mosques because of the rather superfluous construction of minarets). In my local area 3 mosques are located in buildings built as pubs, quite a few are in various housing types (terrace, semi-detached etc), several are in former schools or community centres, one is in a former cinema (as is a nearby church). There is one purpose built mosque. As one of the pubs converted to a mosque had some heritage value, the mosque committee retained quite a number of fixtures & fittings from the pub. As has been said the key tag is amenity=place_of_worship and building=* should just follow well-established usage, which avoid redundant tagging saying the same thing, and allows a deeper understanding of the built environment. SK53 (talk) 16:23, 28 August 2022 (UTC)

Thank you both. I'll defer to your longer service.
To Mateusz's question about benefit, in my view it would be a more rational system, and more consistent with what I feel must be de facto usage for other buildings. Another eg: in the UK there are many 18th and 19th Century houses in town centres used as offices. I just can't imagine people tag them "building=house" + "office=*": the cognitive dissonance is too great. We don't want to be in ceci n'est pas une pipe territory: better imo to give the architectural experts building:type, while ordinary mappers map what the building is generally understood to be (ie, its use). I guess a few hours on Overpass might prove me wrong.
(The redundancy you identified at Wansford was my poor drafting. I agree building=yes + building:type=church would be silly. building=house + building:type=church is what I meant.)
As for building=mosque in the UK easily identified by superfluous minarets, I agree that's often the case. But there's a slow but growing movement in Europe to mosques in the vernacular style - as they always used to be, before mass immigration. (Eg, here's a building=mosque in Poland) eteb3 (talk) 09:11, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

Missed this last comment. The mosque at Kruszyniany is very distinctive. I had the privilege of visiting it in 2012. Clearly from interior layout and a few exterior features it is a mosque. I'm sure I read that the actual vernacular design was at least in part to keep the buildings function discrete, although it may also have been related to resources and skills available locally. SK53 (talk) 14:23, 13 January 2023 (UTC)

Proposal to re-classify and re-work this page

I think the discussion above shows that what most people call a "mosque" is two very different things in OSM, but we don't explain them both in one place. I would suggest we change the Mosque page from a disambiguation page to one that covers mosques as culturally understood (off OSM, "mosque" is a mental amalgam of building=mosque and amenity=place_of_worship). We can then set all these nuances down in one place.
The prompt for this suggestion is that I started to put guidance on the building=mosque page about how to recognize a mosque in the UK (eg, how to distinguish a genuine community centre from an amenity=place_of_worship + religion=muslim that calls itself a community centre). But I quickly realised that this didn't apply to a building=mosque and so didn't belong on that page.
I don't think it's just me that would find the difference between these two OSM objects puzzling. We could put all the relevant considerations in one place.
There's much more I'd like to add to the wiki on mosques. I feel like they need a page of their own :) eteb3 (talk) 09:28, 2 October 2022 (UTC) eteb3 (talk) 09:28, 2 October 2022 (UTC)

It makes sense, feel free to extend this page if that would be useful Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 13:17, 2 October 2022 (UTC)