[josm-dev] Checking tags

Jochen Topf jochen at remote.org
Mon Mar 23 10:25:13 UTC 2015


On Mo, Mär 23, 2015 at 11:06:59 +0100, Dirk Stöcker wrote:
> On Mon, 23 Mar 2015, Jochen Topf wrote:
> 
> >You can download the key lists from here:
> >http://tmp.jochentopf.com/bdeda93e7dcc24f27e3822d4c95400b6/
> 
> I'm not convinced of that yet in the proposed form. E.g. the good list
> contains many keys, which we discard on upload. And other stuff which mainly
> comes from automatic imports, but has no real use to OSM.
> 
> For me a good list should really be good. This simply means documented and
> accepted. Essentially this boils down to usage in one of the major presets,
> the wiki or other highly accepted places. Everything else should be UNKNOWN,
> even when used a lot. Taginfo has this information, so could you compile a
> good list based on this instead of the database?

Sure, I could do that. But I think we have a misunderstanding here what the
"green" is supposed to mean. When I started this thread I wanted a mechanism to
alert users that they might have mistyped something. In that scenario I only
warn users that something might be wrong very rarely. Most keys that are
commonly used in the database should not trigger that warning. Otherwise users
will just ignore it. This is the problem with the current validator. Every time
I use it, I am so overwhelmed with things I am supposed to fix, that I just
ignore it. Yes, I know I can configure it, but that is complicated and not many
people probably do it.

If we have a stricter list whats "green" we have two problems: a) Users might
just ignore it and b) JOSM will even more than it does now, decide whats good
and whats bad. And we (as developers) have to be very careful with that
responsibility and probably bring this discussion into the wider community.
I feel much more comfortable with telling users that they should not use the
equal sign in keys (because I can't imagine that anybody would think thats
a good idea) than deprecating a tag thats widely used.

So I think we should introduce the functionality into JOSM to differentiate
between good and bad keys/tags, but be very conservative with what we mark as
bad. Lets start out with obvious cases and we can later discuss step by step
more "drastic" measures once we have some experience with the functionality.
This way we can keep controversy to a minimum (why is my favourite tag suddenly
"bas") and we avoid overwhelming people with too many problems they need to
fix at once.

Jochen
-- 
Jochen Topf  jochen at remote.org  http://www.jochentopf.com/  +49-173-7019282



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