Talk:Tag:tourism=attraction

Tourism attraction for ways?

I have hard to understand the logic why tag tourism=attraction can't be assigned to ways. For example waterway=weir and waterway=dam can be tourism attractions. Comments? --Kslotte 18:59, 4 March 2010 (UTC)

Answering myself. It is better to use waterway=weir (the primary map feature) and tourism=yes instead. --Kslotte 11:11, 24 March 2010 (UTC)

Not well defined

Tourist Attraction on Wikipedia: "A tourist attraction is a place of interest where tourists visit, typically for its inherent or exhibited natural or cultural value, historical significance, natural or built beauty, offering leisure, adventure and amusement."

This tag is not well defined. Problems:

1. Every attraction is a feature which should be tagged by another main tag. This makes tourism=attraction a property, while the other values of tourism=* are main keys.
2. A tourism=artwork or tourism=museum or tourism=gallery might be an attraction or not, depending on fame. The usage of tourism=* to mark attractions should be avoided.
3. Proposed features/Key:attraction started as a subtag of this tag but has been developed further. This lead to many tourism=attraction on rides/animal cages, dilluting this tag.

My thoughts: tourism=attraction should be deprecated in favour of a new property: tourist_attraction=yes or using a prefix tourism:attraction=yes. --Jojo4u (talk) 11:35, 10 September 2015 (UTC)

The problem is not quite unique. You may view sport=swimming or nudism=* as property of something else but quite some mappers tag it as a single node without another main tag. If we were to fix one problem we should try to fix all similar cases and cater for both types of usage. RicoZ (talk) 11:11, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Indeed, but at least both have in der description that they should be added to physical feature.--Jojo4u (talk) 13:10, 11 September 2015 (UTC)

Claim of subjectivity

"his usage has a problem of subjectivity: why should one waterfall be considered more tourism-worthy than another" - why it would be bigger problem than distinguishing waterway=stream from waterway=river or highway=tertiary from highway=secondary?

Boundaries of many things are fuzzy and there will be different opinions, some people have extremely niche interest but "local tourism attraction" seems mappable to me Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 09:40, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

And specifically to waterfalls: "why should one waterfall be considered more tourism-worthy than another" - typical cases include (a) accessibility, especially in protected areas where only some waterfalls may be visited and ones closer to populated areas/tourism areas are more likely to be tourism attraction, (b) safety - some waterfalls have special viewing platforms or other protections allowing safer visit, (c) size - larger waterfalls are more likely to be a tourism attraction, (d) general beauty of surrounding area.

Mapping this is useful, as areas may have many waterfalls but some of them basically unusable as tourism attraction, distinguishing them is useful Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 09:43, 13 October 2020 (UTC)

While the precise division between waterway=stream and waterway=river is fuzzy, there is a criteria that one can jump across a stream, but a river is too wide to be jumped. This is a physical characteristic. Now it would be better if it were defined more precisely, like "more than 3 meters from bank to bank" or "the water is more than 2 meters wide in the high season" but it's not subjective. The distinction between highway=tertiary and highway=secondary is less clear, but the relevant wiki pages make an attempt to show how the tags are used (based on original English usage mostly, where these tags corresponded to certain local highway classes). In the eastern USA, a "State Highway" is usually a highway=secondary and a "County Highway" is usually highway=tertiary, for example - but I agree that the distinction is often not so clear.

But your points about waterfalls suggest that each of the things would be better to map separately. If a waterfall is accessible, we can map the paths or footways that access it, and mention the surface=* - if there is a paved footway it is more accessible. Location near a road or near a town is shown by the geometry in the database and need not be mapped. Special viewing platforms could be mapped separately. Size can be mapped with height=* for the fall (and width=* for the waterway). The last one, "general beauty of the surrounding area" is almost entirely subjective, but it would be better to have a tag like "beautiful=yes" rather than using "tourism=yes" or "tourism=attraction" to mean "this spot is considered very lovely by most American tourists" - at least then it would be clear what is being claimed. --Jeisenbe (talk) 05:15, 15 October 2020 (UTC)

Bare tourism=attraction

@Jeisenbe: - are you sure that bare tourism=attraction is valid tagging, not just a popular tagging mistake? BTW, new example is needed as I edited https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/116818224

Disclaimer: I consider it as a clearly incorrect tagging, so I will edit and fix any new examples that will appear. I also created Maproulette project for fixing such tagging (bare tourism=attraction in Mongolia, bare tourism=attraction in Suriname, bare tourism=attraction in Namibia - if anyone is looking for such challenge in their country I can setup it)

Subdisclaimer: maproulette contains some useless and harmful challenges, use your brain while using it. Remember that anyone may create any challenge there Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 12:23, 5 March 2021 (UTC)

The first description of this tag in 2014 was "A general tourist attraction" - https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Tag:tourism%3Dattraction&oldid=981195 - though it was also mentioned that it could be added to another feature tag like historic=* at that time, it is clear that many mappers have used this for "tourism attractions" in the vague general sense when they did not know of a more specific tag. This query ( https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/14KV ) finds over 109K tourism=attraction nodes without amenity=, historic=, leisure=, natural=, man_made=, or waterway=waterfall - the most common features. You can try it out in your area: https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/14KY - there are over 6K in the Krakow to Warsaw bounding box, many just a tourism=attraction node + name=*. --Jeisenbe (talk) 05:46, 7 March 2021 (UTC)

At least landuse and attraction also should be excluded - https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/25113592 https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/598877712 are valid and describe what kind of feature is there. I am not disagreeing that bare tourism is often tagged, but it always incomplete and tags specifying what is actually there always can be added. Good idea about looking in my area - current query is https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/15sd (I just cleaned several cases like missing main tags, often from MAPS.ME edits) Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 22:00, 26 March 2021 (UTC)