[Tagging] Colour coding of wiki description boxes

[Christoph Hormann]

On Monday 27 April 2015, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>
> I think that is wrong to colour-code the whole box red for
> "deprecated" feature, for the usual reason - it only takes a handful
> of people to "deprecate" something and this could easily lead to
> widely used tags being shown in red, leading people to believe that
> there is something wrong about them.

Yes, the proposal process is simply unsuited in a meritocratic system 
like OSM for tags that are currently in significant use.  It makes a 
lot of sense to discuss and evaluate new tags from scratch or to 
decommission tags that have gone out of use almost completely.  
Unfortunately these applications of the proposal system are rare these 
days and it is too often used to push a certain tagging scheme against 
competing ideas.

Or to phrase it differently - the opinion of mappers using a tag should 
weight at least as much as those of people voting on a tag proposal and 
it is a problem when a tag that is actively used by 100 people is 
deprecate by votes of just a few.  Same goes the other way round of 
course - a proposal rejection despite a lot of people following it does 
not really mean that much.

Instead of a deprecatation proposal on a actively used tag the arguments 
against it should be put up in the tag documentation to convince 
mappers not to use it rather than discouraging them by use of signal 
colors.  There is for example the {{Verifiability}} template that can 
be used to indicate tags that are vague in definition.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/