Proposal talk:Deprecate healthcare=pharmacy
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Why not shop=pharmacy ?
I also always thought that healthcare=pharmacy didn't fit well. But amenity is seriously overcrowded with tons of stuff that doesn't really belong in there, and pharmacies are mostly point of sales places, so shop would seem like a natural fit. Yes, they do also give health advice, but if you think about it, then that's a function of so many shops that they also give expert advice about the products they're selling --Taktaal (talk) 16:38, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
- "amenity is seriously overcrowded" - personally I am not considering it as a problem Mateusz Konieczny (talk) 17:13, 11 May 2020 (UTC)
- I agree that the amenity namespace is a huge problem itself, so I would leave it as a last resort, close to "object" or "poi". I would say first of all this is almost meaningless and hardly useful as a classification. I can easily say what is a common thing for a pharmacy and a hospital (healthcare), the same with chemist (shop), so both are OK for me, but I could not really say what is the common thing for pharmacy, parking and waste_basket, for example. --Kocio (talk) 14:29, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
- The amenity key is well defined: it is a POI or small area which is of interest to general map users: "a desirable or useful feature or facility of a building or place." General map users will often look for parking lots near their destination, so they are an amenity. And when you visit or move to a new neighborhood, it's quite important to know the closest hospital or pharmacy and school, so schools, hospitals and pharmacies are all amenities. --Jeisenbe (talk) 20:01, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
- I'm fine with amenity=pharmacy. It is a basic facility and "amenity" sounds important and basic at the same time. IMHO "amenity" fits much better than "healthcare" and "shop". --Chris2map (talk) 20:12, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
- This might be seprate discussion, but if definition contains mainly a list and some vague words, I consider it poor, because it works weakly for classifying common things and differentiation (again - what parking has to do with waste_basket? how are they similar? how can I tell that without cherry picking objects?). Building and shop both are useful, but have its own keys and are defined more precisely, yet one is listed as amenity (but your explanantion for parking does not apply here) and the other is not (why? it is similar to parking in that respect) and they are for completely different uses. I think amenity is here only for historical reasons, probably because at the beggining it did not look like worth to establish special namespaces for everything possible, even if thay are much more clear, because it was a small project, and I understand that. It is also quite close to man_made, because I don't expect amenity to be natural feature, so it's more or less duplication with another wide category (which at least helps to immediately shows the difference from natural key). Amenity is just whatever useful did not catch into clear class of objects for some reasons in the history. --Kocio (talk) 21:11, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
- The amenity key is well defined: it is a POI or small area which is of interest to general map users: "a desirable or useful feature or facility of a building or place." General map users will often look for parking lots near their destination, so they are an amenity. And when you visit or move to a new neighborhood, it's quite important to know the closest hospital or pharmacy and school, so schools, hospitals and pharmacies are all amenities. --Jeisenbe (talk) 20:01, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
- I agree that the amenity namespace is a huge problem itself, so I would leave it as a last resort, close to "object" or "poi". I would say first of all this is almost meaningless and hardly useful as a classification. I can easily say what is a common thing for a pharmacy and a hospital (healthcare), the same with chemist (shop), so both are OK for me, but I could not really say what is the common thing for pharmacy, parking and waste_basket, for example. --Kocio (talk) 14:29, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
- A pharmacy is not a shop, because it also provides healthcare services in most countries: there is a pharmacist who will provide advice and warnings about the medications, and who might be able to suggest the right medication to buy (if it does not require a physician's prescription). For this reason we have amenity=fast_food, not shop=fast_food: you buy prepared food at a fast food shop, and prepared medications at a pharmacy, but you are also buying a service, so these are not just retail shops: a fast food place is preparing and serving the food, a pharmacy is providing medication advice and often preparing the medications. Finally, amenity=pharmacy was approved and has been used for over 11 years, while shop=pharmacy was discussed and specificaly rejected when healthcare=* was developed - it would certainly be rejected again if proposed. --Jeisenbe (talk) 20:00, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
- It is exactly all these years that shows in this tag. It ages badly in my opinion. For schools education=* would be better (because there are a lot of different kinds of schools and similar objects) or gastronomy=* for fast food (there are also very useful and broad category, which is different than waste baskets or parkings). This might be a shop, since it basically sells things (you can have advisory in many kind of shops). This is certainly a healthcare, because it's the main purpose. We do it for many objects - not every specific function breaks the definition (I can buy some drugs in general shop for example). You show why you think it is not a shop but you don't explain why it is not a healthcare (I think it clearly is), only what historical aspects are. If history and hand-made list is all that we have for a definition, it is close for ancient science classifications - understanadable and still there as a legacy, but not very efficient for classification anymore. --Kocio (talk) 21:11, 14 May 2020 (UTC)
- A lot of other shops also give expert advice in their areas. Even if pharmacies are probably the shop where the job requirements are the highest, they aren't a completely unusual case. There are people with language degrees working in book shops, people with sports degrees in sports shops and nutritionists in health food shops. The primary function of a pharmacy is that you walk in, then walk out with a product. That in my opinion should qualify it as a shop. And back in the day when OSM was new, everything was simply tossed in the amenity tag. It's a huge pile of wildly varying objects and people have been slowly cleaning that up for the last decade. Putting something that doesn't even fit all that well right back in there seems weird. --Taktaal (talk) 18:57, 18 May 2020 (UTC)
Deprecate healthcare=* completely
The healthcare=pharmacy tag has a more specific key than amenity=*, which includes completely different things, from trash cans to universities. Something B (talk) 11:35, 26 February 2021 (UTC) Although, it isn't a problem itself. Something B (talk) 11:27, 30 April 2023 (UTC)