Recently I was digging for some details of a farm I was mapping and came across a map of the locations of milk churn stands in the county of Ceredigion. It struck me that we should have a way of tagging mllk churn stands.
They are platforms, usually constructed from bricks or concrete, occasionally large chunks of stone, sometimes made of wood, that are usually located near the entrances to farms. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_churn_stand and https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Milk_churn_stands I consider them to be mappable because they can aid navigation and can be used by walkers as improvised tables/seats. Probably not worth rendering on the standard map but could be rendered by walking maps. They came into use in the 19th century and fell into disuse in the UK in 1979 when milk collection was entirely by tanker. Although the Wikipedia article mentions only the UK, they were in use in other parts of the world such as Germany, Finland, Norway, Sweden and Estonia. They may still be used in 2nd or 3rd world countries. The purpose was for the farmer to place large containers of milk on the stand to make it easier for them to be transferred to a cart (later lorry). Although no longer used in the countries already mentioned, they are unlikely to be removed because that would take time and money and (usually) nothing would be gained. My instinct would be to use man_made=milk_churn_stand. Checking with taginfo shows this has already been used once. Overpass-turbo shows it was used in Germany. I'm not entirely happy with "milk churn stand" even though in British English the milk containers were known as "milk churns" despite not being used to churn milk, but I can't think of anything better. Etymology of the misleading name is here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Milk_churn The existing instance I found also included historic=yes. I don't consider that should be used with most milk churn stands as it is not a synonym for old or disused but means it is of historical significance (most of these are not). They should probably have disused=yes or a disused lifecycle prefix (cue endless arguments about which) except in parts of the world where they actually are still in use (if they are). Here's the map I found. It deals only with the county of Ceredigion and the person responsible has only dealt with about half of that county so far. Until and unless I can get a response from him I don't entirely trust the accuracy of his locations and wouldn't use them anyway because of copyright (unless he gave permission and assurances of accuracy). But his map gives some idea of the ubiquity of these things. https://www.lookingformaps.com/mapa.php?mapa=Stondinau-Llaeth-Ceredigion-Milk-Stands-Dr-Roger-Owen-Prifysgol-Aberystwyth-Uni Be patient, it takes a while for the map to load. Why do I bring all this up here? Because I'd like to document what tag(s) to use for milk churn stands. The person who mapped the German one as man_made=milk_churn_stand says he mapped another one as historic=milk_churn_stand because he wasn't sure of the best way to map them. I know, this is going to trigger the usual chicken-and-egg arguments. "It's only been used once so we shouldn't use it" and "It's only been used once so we shouldn't document it until it becomes popular" to which I'll counter "If we don't document it then people will invent their own ways of tagging these things and we'll end up with the usual mess which we can't change because all the different ways of mapping it are too widely used" and "it's not a key, it's just a value." -- Paul
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