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

[Erik Johansson]

On Wed, Nov 5, 2008 at 12:26 AM, Matt Amos <zerebubuth at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 10:46 PM, Erik Johansson <erjohan at gmail.com> wrote:
>> COn Tue, Nov 4, 2008 at 6:16 PM, Richard Fairhurst <richard at systemed.net> wrote:
>>> The people doing the "defining" are, in many cases, not the ones who
>>> are doing the mapping. There are plenty of people voting on things
>>> just because they like voting.
>>>
>>> If people refrained from discussing and voting unless they had
>>> _personally_ come up against the problem that the proposal was aiming
>>> to solve, I think the process would have a lot more respect.
>>
>> Real mappers don't document; their tags are enough.  Wannabe mappers
>> read documentation and follow templates. So how should you become a
>> mapper if there is no documentation. There is a lack of people who are
>> willing to write something on the wiki, not too many.
>
> there have been occasions when "real" mappers have documented their
> tags on the wiki, only to have the wiki pages overwritten by someone
> else's "better ideas". maybe this puts some people off?

Yes that is very cumbersome but how often does this happen, and does
it really warrant that flippant attitude? Having a better way to
handle multiple meanings of tags might help.

But perhaps Frederik is right maybe it's just too much work to
translate wiki preferences automatically to JOSM, potlatch templates
(also stylesheets for Osmarender and Mapnik to take the common
complaint from people who wants new tags).