[OSM-dev] The wiki defines the database (was: relations)

[Ulf Lamping]

Chris Jones schrieb:
> 
> On 4 Nov 2008, at 20:56, Ulf Lamping wrote:
>> It's simply a misconception that the voting process necessarily
>> needs that all people involved to be experts of the topic. If the
>> proposal is well prepared and discussed even by a very small number of
>> people knowing what they are talking about, you will - even as an
>> "outsider" - get a good idea if the feature is a good thing or not.
> 
> Surely the only voting process that carries any weight in the long run 
> is people actually using a given key/value pair in the database...

Yes and no.

It's not a good idea to simply assume that the database is enough.

The database only carries the syntax. It can tell you what tags people 
use. However, it can not tell you the semantic of the tag - what people 
meant. As this seems pretty obvious at a glance it's unfortunately not 
that easy.

There is lot's of examples of these confusions:

landuse=forest vs. natural=wood

 From simply looking at both tags, it's just not possible to be sure 
about the differences. In fact at least here in germany since recently a 
lot of people weren't even aware that there are two such tags and that 
there are differences what they mean.

There are a lot more examples about these confusions, and without 
documenting the tags this will continue.

> 
> Why not just provide a list of popular tags (like map_features does 
> now), and a long list of possibilities for things not on the 'popular' 
> list (basicly what the Proposed_features currently do).

We call that tagwatch: http://tagwatch.stoecker.eu/Europe/En/index.html ;-)

> 
> Any proposed features that see significant real world usage make there 
> way onto the map_features page.

Well, I've recently added some often used tags indicated by tagwatch to 
the Map Features page. It wasn't easy for me to write a good tag 
description, as I couldn't get it from the database or any proposals.

There are still some tags that are in significant use that I didn't 
added to Map Features, just because I wasn't sure what they really meant ...

Regards, ULFL