Pumps cartography is useful in many ways in OSM and currently practiced around water wells. It’s possible to use the pump=* key to state for a pump availability on a given well only. The key actually refers to the pump drivers, a motor or a lever to manually move the pump.
It’s an important information as to know if you’ll be able to get water with or without physical effort.
For instance, it’s not yet possible to make a significant distinction between pumps running on electricity or gasoline engines among other possibilities.

Pumps are obvious but complex devices. Wikipedia already provides a comprehensive classification with up to 15 different kinds.

Each design have different capabilities and can be driven by numerous different drivers. OSM could get benefits from encouraging mappers to complete such detailed information with appropriate tags if they are knowledgeable to do so.
It’s clear that such information will help crisis management or emergency rescue teams to restore water supply if and only if they have appropriate generators or engines. Coming around a gasoline powered pump with a solar panel won’t help.
People themselves could be interested in case they have to bring their own material to get water.

A water well in Mali operating with manual piston pump. It’s proposed to use this new tagging, on a node :

• man_made=water_well (it’s a water well)
• pump=piston (pumping up & down with the lever means it’s a piston pump)
• mechanical_driver=manual
• handle=lever

Currently, using word ‘‘pump’’ to deal with actual drivers could be confusing and worth a try to change toward a more appropriate terminology.
It’s an opportunity to allow pump mapping in many more situations than water wells. Current pump=* really focuses on water wells only.
Ability to make a distinction between manual and powered pumps is still possible depending on knowledge level of mappers, using mechanical_driver=powered if necessary.

Here it is a proposal started in early 2020 and now open to vote; It was designed with wikipedia classification in mind