iD: shop=chemist preset should not be called drugstore in en-US

@pmailkeey, you’re right about full-service stores, like any supermarket, having different departments with different hours and so forth – no argument there. If someone wants to micromap a supermarket with its post office counter, pharmacy counter, florist, and ATM, there’s never been anything stopping them from adding those amenities as POIs within the supermarket building. The same is true about stores such as CVS. Most OSM renderers and search engines can handle this sort of tagging.

My argument for reverting #3201, pending wider discussion, boils down to two things:

1. In American English, the words “pharmacy” and “drugstore” each describe a store that necessarily contains a prescription-filling pharmacy counter, so there’s little incentive for a mapper to separately map the pharmacy counter. The end result is that, iD’s UI aside, newly mapped areas where people say “drugstore” instead of “pharmacy” will lack places to fill prescriptions, because no other OSM software recognizes shop=chemist as a prescription-filling establishment the way iD currently does.
2. iD is well within its right to formalize a popular tagging scheme by offering presets for it. Other OSM software, such as the Standard renderer, do the same on a regular basis. But it’s quite another matter for iD to unilaterally influence the way its users interpret and use a well established tag, without any way for the rest of the OSM ecosystem to detect that change. I’m confident that any change made to the wiki solely on the basis of iD’s UI, without broader discussion, would be reverted anyhow.

In the past, the community has resolved confusing situations like amenity=pharmacy versus shop=chemist by adopting an altogether new, unambiguous set of tags. But that can’t happen until the discussion moves to the mailing lists.

I had a closer look at this now. I’m afraid the issue is not that easy to solve, and whatever we choose, there are disadvantages. Some points:

• According to the wiki, shops that sell prescription drugs should not be tagged as shop=chemist
• In both the UK and the US, shops that sell both beauty and medicines (such as Boots in the UK and Walgreens and CVS in the US are typically tagged as amenity=pharmacy, not shop=chemist
• Therefore, a scheme that suggests shops like Walgreens and CVS should be tagged as shop=chemist goes both against the wiki and current practice
• I think therefore a scheme in which Walgreens and CVS should be tagged as shop=chemist should be discussed with the (US?) community first

the closest translation of UK “Chemist” in US is “Drugstore”

It may be the closest, but it’s still problematic. Now an American iD user who wants to tag a Rite Aid may search for “drugstore” and end up tagging the building with shop=chemist; it’s unlikely that they’ll also tag the pharmacy counter separately, having already tagged a “drugstore”. An American JOSM user could see that the building is now tagged “Shops/Other/Chemist” and change it to “Facilities/Health/Pharmacy”, because the meaning of “chemist” in OSM has always referred to non-dispensing shops – a stricter definition than the one commonly used in Britain – and they had no reason to believe that iD would unilaterally change the definition. A renderer that wanted to mark only dispensing shops with a caduceus used to be able to just look for amenity=pharmacy, but now it also has to look for shop=chemist (and only those tagged using iD). Meanwhile, another American iD user may want to tag the CVS across from the Rite Aid; searching for “pharmacy”, they’ll end up tagging the building with amenity=pharmacy.

The confusion is that the proposal in https://github.com/osmlab/name-suggestion-index/issues/30#issuecomment-228798011 affects the interpretation of 170,000 amenity=pharmacys and 17,000 shop=chemists and creates ambiguity about newly tagged objects. OSM tagging is awash with idiosyncrasies, and I share your enthusiasm about sorting them out, but there are established ways of doing so that make sure everyone’s on the same page.