[Tagging] Voting for Relation type=waterway

[Chris Hill]

On 19/02/12 23:38, Steve Bennett wrote:
> On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 2:53 AM, Chris Hill<osm at raggedred.net>  wrote:
>> I do not agree with the whole basis of this thread.
>>
>> There are no such things as approved tags, tagging is open and people are
>> free to use *any* tags they like.
> ...
>> Advertise your ideas and encourage acceptance. Show how well it works any
> How would you know whether a tag had "acceptance"? Wouldn't
> documenting it somewhere make sense? Maybe...in a wiki?
I did say document and discuss the OP.
> What would you
> call "acceptance"? Would "approved" be a reasonable synonym for that?
No. It implies some official status that leads people to remove other 
tags, sometimes with mass edits.
>
> The wiki and (currently broken) approval mechanism is not some
> horrible bureaucracy that exists to ruin your life. It's there so we,
> as a community, can document the tags we use, and agree on how we use
> them. While it's ok to spontaneously invent a new tag and use it to
> solve your current problem, you can surely see the benefits of
> everyone eventually converging on the same tag?
>
> And if so, what would you do with all the old tags that people used
> before you converged? Wouldn't you "deprecate" them?
No, some tags will wither away, fine. Some seemingly similar tags will 
exist side-by-side and that is fine too. Most importantly, distinctive 
differences can emerge too.

Just think this through. Approval implies some sort of enforcement, 
without enforcement what is the point of approval? Just who would make 
this enforcement happen and how? What would that do to an open project? 
If only approved tags are used then how would mappers map what they 
actually see? Wait weeks for some committee to discuss, argue and 
approve or reject the tag? If you are free to use any tag, what is an 
approval process for?

If approval or 'acceptance' means a tag is rendered or used in a router 
or whatever then which tool do you mean? There are hundreds run by OSM 
and other organisations, companies and individuals.

Flattening the tag structure by homogenising tags is destroying the fine 
detail, sometimes carefully crafted by mappers and I will continue to 
speak out against mass edits that attempt to do just that.

-- 
Cheers, Chris
user: chillly