What I mean is that this tag is extremely niche, requires local survey, takes some effort to survey, is not very specific, and probably not useful for most people, even with old phones.

Most people probably don’t have old phones. But almost everyone who does would benefit. Only those who never need to connect on the go would not benefit. Those with new phones would also benefit if the information has good granularity, which I will explain below.

Mention of old phones was a human-to-human abstraction. Vulnerable groups of people are being marginalised. The DB would not use the term “old” or “new”.

What most importantly needs to be captured at the simplest level is:

• Internet access: null (unknown)
• Internet access: none (verified)
• Internet access: discriminatory
• Internet access: non-discriminatory

The discriminatory connection can be regarded as such for many different reasons, some deliberate (captive portal w/SMS verify), many incidental (captive portal coded by a JavaScript fanatic with no sense of standards or interoperability).

It requires quite a bit of technical knowledge to even know what a captive portal is,

Only if this is a purely manual process. Captive portals are trivial to auto-detect.

it also requires going inside the establishment, asking for a Wi-Fi password,

Only if there is a p/w. This would be a minority of cases.

figuring out if this captive portal can be used with an “older phone” (this is the unspecific bit),

Non-trivial indeed for anyone with a newer phone. An app could work out what tech is being pushed. But it may be impossible for an app to determine what tech is relevant to passing the captive portal. So accurate granular data would likely rely on manual intervention.

All this while we still don’t have opening_hours for the majority of amenities, and I’d guess the vast majority of POIs worldwide are not mapped at all.

This is really irrelevant. Volunteers contribute what they want. And rightfully so. Opening hours could be made less labor intensive with an AI app that encodes the hours based on a photo. But in any case, having some type of missing info is no justification for preventing people from adding other missing info.

What I would propose instead of changing the internet_access key itself, is to define a new key like internet_access:captive_portal, with defined values of

• yes: a captive portal is there but doesn’t require personal info, e.g. one that shows you ads
• phone_number: requires just a phone number which you can confirm is yours, is a legal requirement in many countries
• id: requires some form of ID but no phone number, sometimes can be a legal replacement for the phone number
• no: no captive portal

This just adds new info instead of changing the already-understood internet_access key,

I’m not sure why I would be fussy about whether it uses one attribute or another. DB experts would likely and rightfully want to ensure the info is not redundant or having potential for contradiction.

Captive portals come in countless forms: userid+pw, Tel#, GSM-only # for SMS verification, email, ToS agreement, and any combination of those. What’s important is some captive portals are non-discriminatory (no info required and also does not push JavaScript frills that breaks things).

If an AP is 802.11b w/out captive portal, that is a trivial case where it’s safe enough to yield a “non-discriminatory” tag.

But TBH even this is completely impractical and will be useless for the stated purpose.

Only if you do it wrong.

Just trying a few different cafes until you find one where the internet works for you is a much better strategy than trusting a stranger to correctly fill in some obscure key.

Try to step outside of yourself and your own privileged lifestyle and envision yourself in the shoes of marginalised travelers. You land in a foreign city on a cheap day trip. You have ~8-10 hours to experience the city before getting back on the bus or train. You might know you can go to McDonalds to get connected reliably, but you’re failing to exploit effeciently using precious time in a city that has more to offer than you can experience.

You might decide you want local pancakes, not McDonalds pancakes. There are ~10 places marked as having pancakes. Seven have “Internet”, and are scattered around a 7km area. If you go from one to the other on foot, you can easily blow ~20% of your day on a hunt, and still come up empty-handed. If just one pancake shop has “non-discriminatory Internet”, you can make that your 1st attempt and have a good chance at getting a no-bullshit connection while also getting pancakes.

But you have to understand that even if you push this through and it appears on the wiki, this is mostly just for fun.

Helping marginalised people function is more than “just for fun”. Blocking it amounts to being part of the list of problems that force people to upgrade phones and add to the world’s e-waste.