[Tagging] Successful proposal

Richard Fairhurst richard at systemed.net
Wed Oct 13 10:22:08 BST 2010


lennard wrote:
> And how exactly would the craft tag become widely used if people have 
> to out on a limb to find it, exactly because it's not mentioned in the 
> Map Features? This will only hamper adoption.

Ah, but the purpose of Map Features is not "let's make my favourite tags
widely used! they're great!". Adoption is not an end in itself. The purpose
of Map Features is to provide a one-stop reference for mappers.

You only find out whether a tag is good or not by using it. 200 people using
a tag will throw up problems and challenges that were never imagined by the
original proposer and the small coterie of people who vote on the wiki. The
tag will evolve and become something really useful through the input of
those 200 people - including many of those who post on this list.

So we need to give a new tag the space to be tested and to evolve. Map
Features is not that space. For better or for worse, putting something in
Map Features has a degree of 'finality' about it. There are several tags
which would have benefited from serious real-life review but have become
fossilised by prematurely being added to Map Features.

The Approved Features page, however, is perfectly suited for this. It can
act as a staging post so "those who know" can try out the tag, find any
real-life problems, suggest any rationalisation, and so on. Editor preset
authors can watch its progress and consider adding it. And so on. Once, or
if, it gets serious traction then it can be added to Map Features.

By analogy: Potlatch 2 has not been deployed on osm.org straightaway; we
have an instance running elsewhere (geowiki.com) for people to test. It
still talks to the main database, of course, but we're fine-tuning it so
that when it's deployed to osm.org, it'll have been adapted to take account
of all the feedback we've received. Tags are exactly the same.

cheers
Richard
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