Proposal:Planted date unification

Proposal

Establish that start_date=* is the primary way of tagging the date when vegetation was planted in its current location (or otherwise came into existence).

Deprecate the following tags, encouraging usage of start_date=* instead as a drop-in replacement:

• planted_date=*
• planted=*
• date_planted=*
• date:planted=*
• year_planted=*
• plant_year=*

Deprecate the planted:age=* tag, encouraging concrete years/months/days with start_date=*, and the tree's size with age=*.

Further consensus is needed on age=*.

Rationale

Currently, we use a variety of tags to indicate when a plant was planted. This is undesirable for people who want to query or display that information in a unified manner.

start_date=* is the most-used tag for indicating planted dates on OSM (427,464 at the time of writing) and has applications outside of mapping plants, so I selected it to be the primary tag.

Statistics for tags that will be deprecated are linked below.

Tagging

Use the established conventions used with start_date=*.

Examples

Here are a handful of examples correctly using start_date=* for planted dates:

• node 11036039567 (named significant historical tree)
• node 9543825822 (named significant local tree)
• node 3707416388 (unnamed ordinary tree)

Rendering

Not necessarily relevant.

Features/Pages affected

• Add a section to start_date=* explaining the new convention.
• Mark planted_date=* as deprecated.
• Create the following pages as redirects to one of the above pages. Redirect them to a section explaining the deprecation:
  • planted=*
  • date:planted=*
  • planted_date=*
  • year_planted=*
  • plant_date=*
  • plant:age=* - This one is a bit special, considering the additional existence of age=*.

External discussions

• community.openstreetmap.org

Comments

Please comment on the discussion page.