[Tagging] The current problem with tagging

[Tobias Knerr]

Mike N.:
>   The case I run into is "How do I  tag y" - the wiki is well laid out, but 
> the answer is often not as accessible as it should be.  I tried to tag law 
> offices in a meaningful way.  Searching for Lawyer, Legal, Barrister even in 
> the proposed pages brought up nothing.  I can't believe I'm the first person 
> to want to do this.  I should have used Google because there is a tag called 
> shop=lawyer on the 'Abandoned' Wiki pages.

Why google? There is a search box in the wiki that I'd use first:
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php?title=Special:Search&search=lawyer

First hit is the abandoned proposal amenity=lawyer. Unfortunately,
there's a lot of ODBL and licensing results, too, so maybe we could
introduce a namespace for tagging so you could only search tag
documentation and proposals?

>   The point is that scholarly research is time consuming, and most people 
> don't have the patience and we're possibly discouraging mappers who would 
> otherwise contribute.

Do you have an easier solution than a search box? Integration of that
search box with editors would be nice (these could then search their
presets, too), but I don't think there is a more useful user interface
for answering the "How do I tag y" question.

By the way: We also have a German page for "natural language -> tags" in
the wiki (http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/DE:Howto_Map_A) which is
maintained manually. The English equivalent is rather limited, though.

Tobias Knerr