Option "vegetarian" informative for cafés?

[gwselke]

A relatively newbie question re tagging standards: (I hope this is the right place to ask - otherwise I'd be grateful for a pointer) :
For cafés, SC asks whether it has vegetarian offers. (Yes, I have specifically configured SC to ask me about vegetarian, because I am veggie and I do care for veggie restaurants.) AFAICR, though, I haven't ever seen a café in my life that did not exclusively or at least overwhelmingly offer vegetarian food. (Or is that biased by eurocentrism??) As an OSM consumer, when trying to find a café, would I (being a veggie) ever bother to check whether it has vegetarian options, or would I take this just for granted?

So, while I (as a SC tagger) find it useful to be able to opt in to bein asked about veggie options for restaurants, does it make sense to always be asked about veggie cafés if the answer is invariably "yes"?
Up to now, I have hesitated to mark any café as veggie, because I wondered what would distinguish this café from all the other millions of cafés in the world to warrant being tagged.

(Yes, I know that the OSM wiki specifically mentions cafés as places where a vegetarian tag is appropriate. I still wonder.)
Any helpful opinions welcome!

[mnalis]

Hi, and welcome!

AFAICR, though, I haven't ever seen a café in my life that did not exclusively or at least overwhelmingly offer vegetarian food. (Or is that biased by eurocentrism??)

Yes, possibly eurocentrism, and a specific dialect of it (I'd guess if one were to go more to the e.g. eastern Europe parts their experiences might change drastically compared to western counterparts). Anyway, according to taginfo for amenity=cafe, out of ~14 .5k tagged diet:vegetarian=* values, some ~12% have a value different from yes (majority of them no). So, apparently they exist in non-negligible numbers.

As an OSM consumer, when trying to find a café, would I (being a veggie) ever bother to check whether it has vegetarian options, or would I take this just for granted?

That's hard to say. For example, in my little part of Europe, If I were looking for some vegetarian food I would not bother searching for amenity=cafe at all (nor I would do it if I were looking for any food - regardless of diet type).

IOW, were I interested in eating some vegetarian food, I'd probably just search for diet:vegetarian ~ yes|only, regardless whether that was cafe, fast food, food court, pub, biergarten, restaurant, bakery or whatever else, as long as I can get such types of food there. YMMV, of course.

And if there is anything that OSM has taught me, it's that every little thing one takes for granted is likely completely different on some other part of the planet. 😺

Only thing I can tell you for sure is that if someone does try to search for diet:vegetarian=yes & amenity=cafe, that they won't get any matches unless someone (like you) has actually tagged those values.

(Yes, I have specifically configured SC to ask me about vegetarian, because I am veggie and I do care for veggie restaurants.)

Well, there are several ways to handle the issue of "spamminess" (i.e. quest being asked where it is implied), but I'd recommend:

• mapper answering the quest with yes if there are also vegetarian options or only if there are only vegetarian options - even if there are basically no no answers in their area, that is very useful distinction in itself (e.g. yes vs. only allows data users to e.g. boycott cafes which support animal killing, and it also enables vegan quest which is even more important to some people)

Other less desirable options might include:

• SC being changed to stop asking for amenity=cafe in the whole world (which would be bad for Vegetarians, seeing that 12% stats above; but also due to other reasons)
• some hack to ask for cafes in some countries, but not others (highly unlikely, enormous research needed, nightmare to implement and maintain)
• mapper disabling the quest in their general preset, and only having in the special preset, to which they switch when they want to map vegan restaurants (annoying).
• mapper just clicking can't say / hide to avoid adding that information to avoid "adding too obvious information" (annoying)
• user switching to SCEE (StreetComplete "Expert edition" fork) and removing only cafes from the quest selection element

[gwselke]

Thank you for this answer, Matija, this is really helpful! I should have looked at the stats myself, that in itself would have answered my question. And of course, you are right about everything being different at least somewhere. And I'll henceforth happily tag many cafés as veggie (yes or only, as the case may be -- SC doesn't seem to offer "limited"), now that it makes sense to me :-).
(No, I'm certainly not suggesting to changing SC. But thanks for the pointer to SCEE, about which I didn't know. Won't be necessary here, for reasons given above, but might be handy in some future.)