[Tagging] Increasing voting participation (Was Accepted or rejected?)
Frederik Ramm
frederik at remote.org
Wed Mar 18 07:21:30 UTC 2015
Everyone,
I think this is going in the wrong direction. I have just skim-read
this thread but I have the impression that the basic assumption seems to
be "tagging votes are an important core element of how we work at OSM,
so we must increase participation, make tagging votes more widely known,
and translate proposals so that everyone can participate".
It is however not true that tagging votes are an important core element
of how we work; we can do perfectly fine without. Even if certain things
were tagged differently in different parts of the word, that would not
break OpenStreetMap.
Tagging votes are not a big and important thing; in my opinion, they are
not even important enough to warrant a posting to a national-language
mailing list that says "please vote" (hello Bryce). Votes are neither
binding (for editors or renderers), nor are they final. If a vote were
held on something and it later turns out that a much larger proportion
of people than actually participated in the vote dislike the outcome,
then the vote is practically void.
A democratic vote might be a good tool for some things; it is not the
proper tool to decide on tagging in OpenStreetMap. The outcome of a vote
should really be phrased:
"The following 35 people think that this proposal is a good idea and
would recommend using it"
rather than
"This proposal has been accepted"
because the latter really affords the whole process much more relevance
than it actually has.
So please, don't go over board here by trying to force-involve every
mapper in tag votes; they're simply not important enough, and they
*should not be*. Don't try to make them important, lasting, or binding.
Bye
Frederik
--
Frederik Ramm ## eMail frederik at remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
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