On 2014-11-28 14:37, Mihkel Rämmel wrote:
By making all religious buildings highly visible on the current buildings demo style it makes a great style to use when you want to visit all the religious places nearby but nothing else. I do not know about the rest of the world but at least in a typical eastern european city only a few of the religious buildings can be concidered landmarks. In my home city it is 1 of 5.
Here in the New World, the proportion of significant churches is similarly low in many places. Using Cincinnati, Ohio, and its surrounding county as an example, only 25% of OSM-tagged religious buildings could be considered historic.
overpass turbo shows 201 ways in the county that are tagged amenity=place_of_worship, amenity:historic=place_of_worship, or building=church. (We're starting to use specific building tags like =church around here, but we aren't quite there yet.) By comparison, only 45 churches and five synagogues have Wikipedia articles [1] and only 33 buildings with "church", "chapel", "cathedral", or "temple" in their names are listed on the National Register of Historic Places. [2] By comparison, Wikipedia has more articles on high schools in the same county. [3]
If you include the 460 place-of-worship POIs that could someday be remapped as building footprints, the statistic would drop to less than 8%. (We've already deleted or retagged GNIS-imported churches marked "historic".)
The Cincinnati-Middletown metropolitan statistical area was ranked 71st most religious in a 2012 Gallup poll of 189 U.S. MSAs. Granted, that's a measure of the importance residents place on religion, not the city's church architecture. But there are plenty of places in this country where churches are even less important.
I don't dispute that churches are important to navigation in many older cities, particularly in Europe. But openstreetmap-carto contributors have always reiterated the importance of keeping regional styles to a minimum. The other building types included in the buildings-major layer (supermarket, mall, attraction) each have an inherent largeness or importance, but globally, churches aren't necessarily large or key to wayfinding. (What about building=mosque, building=temple, etc.?)
[1] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Churches_in_Hamilton_County,_Ohio> [2] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/National_Register_of_Historic_Places_listings_in_Hamilton_County,_Ohio> [3] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:High_schools_in_Hamilton_County,_Ohio>
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