[Tagging] The current problem with tagging

[Erik Johansson]

On Mon, Oct 19, 2009 at 2:26 PM, Martin Koppenhoefer
<dieterdreist at gmail.com> wrote:
> 2009/10/19 Erik Johansson <erjohan at gmail.com>:

> I'd say that 95% of the mappers are interested in what the
> renderings show, and that is also in the mapfeatures-list. I agree
> though that in the case you are looking for something special and not
> already documented it will fail.

Since I'm concentrating in the not documented tags that might explain
why I dismiss it as irrelevant. But I really think it's now so big it
is more of a hurdle than anything else, this is from watching newbies
mapping on openstreetmap.


>> Care to expand on what you mean? The wiki search sucks
>
> I don't agree that it sucks. My favorite feature are drinking

But when you don't know the language and can't produce synonyms it
certainly sucks, right?


>> There is a need for personal documentation of tags, easy way to say
>> what this tag means for you. IMO We are severely limited by English,
>> what is easy to describe in Swedish for me, might be hard for me to do
>> in German, Spanish or English.
>
> just go ahead. There is no limit, and everyone can document everything
> on his personal wiki page (IMHO _this_ would lead to bad results, as
> you get everyones own definition and are left alone for deciding,
> which one you prefer, whilst today we maintain one page which displays
> (at it's best) the consensous in definition.

There must still be a standard, that is a consensus on a wikipage,
there are several problems though:
* You tag according to a standard, without understanding "You are doin it wrong"
* You don't know there is a standard and tag as you want
* There is no standard

If you document what you think you are tagging then we have a better
chance to understand what you mean by those two tiny key/val words you
use to describe something.



/Erik