Tagging a day care center or art studio

Apparent consensus on a mailing list is not consensus of the mapping community. There are over 100,000 examples of the use amenity=kindergarten which far outweigh any use of childcare. It is possible to use amenity=kindergarten with kindergarten=day_nursery (the British English term which seems closest to child day care). When a tag is widely used there need to be compelling reasons as to why it should be replaced. For an in-depth discussion of tagging such places see my blog post: http://sk53-osm.blogspot.com/2014/04/getting-all-knitted-up-with-childcare.html .

Please note that kindergarten is not necessarily the same as childcare. The discussion was about preschool, afterschool etc. E.g. In Belgium there are kleuterscholen (9am-4pm) for 3-5 year olds (I think). They are also typically part of a school that offer education for 6-12 year olds. Those are kindergarten for me. They are also other places ( creches) where they accept even younger babies and for extended hours. Those places is what I would tag as amenity=childcare (or whatever the tag is).

There is no consensus currently

@escada roughly the same is true in the UK, but long ago amenity=kindergarten was used for all types (nursery schools, roughly equivalent to kleuterscholen and now rare as standalone institutions; day nurseries which may take kids from 6 months to 5 years; creches, usually associated with a workplace and probably now rare). My local council has about 5-6 other childcare categories. On a w/w scale kindergarten is both used widely and with a broader sense: IMO it makes sense to subtag kindergarten to provide the extra information.