Townhall doesn't have building=yes by default

URL

No response

How to reproduce the issue?

When you create a townhall area, it doesn't have the tag building=yes. I think it should.

Screenshot(s) or anything else?

No response

[Kovoschiz]

=townhall is a facility that can include the grounds of the site, enclosing =parking and other amenities. In general, other features should not have building= added automatically.

=townhall is a facility that can include the grounds of the site, enclosing =parking and other amenities. In general, other features should not have building= added automatically.

town hall
/ˌtoun ˈhôl/
1.
a building used for the administration of local government.
2.
North American English
an event at which a politician or official answers questions from members of the public

[Kovoschiz]

Surely you can find dictionaries defining anything as a "building", but they can be further distinguished more precisely and diversely. You can propose building=townhall for that meaning specifically if justified. That doesn't affect how amenity= should be used.
In maps, applications, and GIS, you can have overlapping features, or even do a spatial join. So building= inside an amenity=townhall can be automatically treated as townhalls by default.

[DujaOSM]

We're discussing presets, which are common combinations of tags, not necessarily just individual tags. Vast majority of administrative town centers are placed in dedicated buildings, many having distinctive style described in building=townhall. Therefore, it is useful to have both those tags in the same preset. The same principle could apply to e.g. amenity=place_of_worship; religion=christian; building=church for a typical church.

Yes, some town administrations aren't placed in a separate building, but e.g. in a community center or something. That's an exception that will justify subsequent editing. I would rather have a mistagged building type, than having a bare amenity=townhall area with no supporting building -- the current situation invites mismapping by newbies.

Tagging the whole surrounding plot with parkings, greenery and amenities as amenity=townhall is just bad. If I saw such one, I would move the tag to the main building.

[Kovoschiz]

Eg not done in the these presets (for ~100k amenity= features)

• education= (cf Support education tag per approved proposal #1472, Education tags: Improve handling of building presets #1632)
• =fire_station (Add Fire Station Building preset #603 has renaming suggested)
• =hospital
• =social_facility (coincidentally close to =townhall )

I see you are repeating another recent discussion #1404
I doubt whether this has been decided by whether the amenity= is usually located in 1 building= only. It seems to separated when there's a building= for it?
building= can be a checkbox (or dropdown list option), to be applied to when needed. What would you do when the townhalls have multiple buildings?
Churches are more complicated. landuse=religious accommodates multiple =place_of_worship inside. However this means =place_of_worship doesn't mean "a church" in those cases, but different worshipping spaces (chapels etc). landuse=religious is fundamentally landuse= a homogeneous statistical classification (and map "paint"), lacking an unique, individual, and indivisible unit of PoI feature, a problem many other landuse= (eg =industrial , =residential ) has, being treated specially with name= as a result.

[mnalis]

Vast majority of administrative town centers are placed in dedicated buildings

^{[citation needed]}

IME, in many smaller towns (i.e. those with value of townhall:type below city), many (most?) of the town halls actually shares a building with other users (often municipal/government-related ones, but sometimes other things like postoffices, libraries, community centers, fire brigade etc).

In those cases, it is typically tagged on separate elements (to avoid problems of dual tagging). Sometimes as nodes¹, but often as polygons too (see e.g. https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/2igQ)

I would rather have a mistagged building type, than having a bare amenity=townhall area with no supporting building -- the current situation invites mismapping by newbies.

Interestingly, I would use exactly the same argument (newbies being likely to just accept whatever is set as the default) to argue for the opposite - since they're not experts, we should not be inventing possibly incorrect tags and adding them, as they wouldn't even know they are (with help of iD) adding incorrect data to the map (i.e. the editor is breaking things behind their backs).

#1779 sounds like a reasonable idea to me. Just don't mess with the user selection (IOW: if they want building, let them indicate it explicitly somehow)

Footnotes

1. because, some mappers prefers not to deal with building:part polygons ↩