[openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website] Add species to wikidata_links helper (#2812)

Andy Allan notifications at github.com
Wed Feb 8 17:44:10 UTC 2023


> Maybe the maintainers think that these links are a [bad idea](https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/issues/2405#issuecomment-544203726)?

So my point of view is not that they are inherently bad, but I'm still not super keen on them:

* There is a more or less unbounded list of tags that could be interpreted in a similar manner. It's hard to know where any line could be drawn, and we could end up with 100+ different destinations for tags that link to external resource lookups (i.e. the tag is some kind of id, that links to a different external site).
* `browse_tags_helper` is fairly complex already. It's already been split into its own file, and at the current rate of change might need further splitting. All this code needs maintaining to some extent, so it's not zero-cost to add more and more complexity and support more tags.
* The external links are not just as easy as put-an-id-into-a-url. `wikidata_links` shows this already, where there's a whole section on handling semi-colon delineated ids (with and without whitespace...), and presumably some other future types of ids could bring their own similar complexities.

Beyond all that, I don't like that this is the major (only?) part of this codebase that closely interprets OSM tags. The rest of the website and API is (mostly, n.b. changeset `comment` tags) tagging agnostic. This is a powerful part of OpenStreetMap, that tags can be invented, changed, rethought and discarded without needing anything changed in the API. Except that here, in the browse_tags_helper, we *do* hard-code the meaning of certain tags. This is something that I would prefer to avoid, both to maintain the power and flexibility for the OSM community, and also because we know that this codebase is used for other projects, who get stuck with the same hardcoding.

I hope this provides some explanation. Obviously I've just merged #3691 so I'm not completely opposed to such tags but there are reasons for me to be cautious about them.

-- 
Reply to this email directly or view it on GitHub:
https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pull/2812#issuecomment-1423005310
You are receiving this because you are subscribed to this thread.

Message ID: <openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website/pull/2812/c1423005310 at github.com>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/rails-dev/attachments/20230208/5fdb7979/attachment.htm>


More information about the rails-dev mailing list