[Tagging] The current problem with tagging

[Liz]

On Mon, 19 Oct 2009, Tobias Knerr wrote:
> 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
>
Tobias, the wiki search is extremely frustating.
I will have multiple main wiki pages open
the abandoned, the voted out, the maybes and the accepted.
I search them all and then have to find out why something was abandoned.
Often things are abandoned because of a time interval, but have not been 
superseded by anything.
This eventually produces a lawyer tag on the search system.
That takes about 15 minutes  to complete and decide on what to do.
That's why the machine readable tag is being suggested, translations done once 
at the API level and able to be picked up by editors automatically.

As a new mapper, about 2 years ago, I thought that the only POIs OSM collected 
were pubs post offices, banks and other things that were in the editor.
I didn't get the slightest hint from the wiki front page that there were 
options for "anything you find".
Searching the wiki is tedious, at least someone else realised that a formal 
search engine did it more efficiently, and has let me know.

Liz