Proposal:Discourage tourism=gallery
| Discourage tourism=gallery | |
|---|---|
| Proposal status: | Abandoned (inactive) |
| Proposed by: | Math1985 |
| Tagging: | tourism=gallery |
| Applies to: | |
| Definition: | DISCOURAGED, use a more specific tag, such as tourism=museum or shop=art |
| Statistics: |
|
| Draft started: | 2016-02-01 |
| RFC start: | 2016-02-01 |
This proposal is abandoned in favour of the proposal Proposed features/Art museums, art galleries and art shops.
Proposal
Explicitly mark the tag tourism=gallery as discouraged by changing the wiki page to contain the following text:
The use of this tag is discouraged. Use either of the following two tags:
- tourism=museum+museum=art for museums that predominantly show artworks.
- shop=art for art showrooms where you can buy the artworks on display.
Rationale
The wiki defines the tag tourism=gallery as 'an area or typically a building that displays a variety of visual art exhibitions'. This is an officially approved tag. In addition, the wiki page on tourism=museum specifies that art galleries should be tagged as tourism=gallery, even if they have 'museum' in the name.
However, practice shows that the tag tourism=gallery is not very frequently used. We have currently 54 951 instances of tourism=museum, versus only 1 505 instances of tourism=gallery. I had a look at some famous galleries: the MoMA in New York, the Uffizi in Florence, the National Gallery of Art in Washington DC, the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam, the Musée d'Orsay in Paris, and the Guggenheim Museum in Bilbao. It turned out that all of them are tagged as tourism=museum.
This might be partly caused by mappers that are simply not aware of the tourism=gallery tagging scheme, but perhaps there is also a more fundamental problem. The line between a gallery and a museum is not always easy to draw, especially in continental Europe, where many museums have both historic and artistic exhibitions (compare for instance the Louvre). Also the fact that many galleries are called 'museum' does not help.