[Tagging] Tools and mass-retagging

[Leo Gaspard]

On 06/08/2018 10:29 AM, Mateusz Konieczny wrote:
> (a) some people would be against any given mass retagging.
> 
> So how to distinguish ones with broad support, sufficient to do that from ones that should not be done?

Well, basically tags are a kind of protocol, between the tagger and the
renderer. Thus, following the process of the IETF would seem to make
sense to me: have a chairman who is in charge of evaluating “rough
consensus” of the ML users about what tags are Good and what tags are Bad.

Also, some mechanical edits lose strictly no information. For the use
case described in this thread, here are two mass-retaggings that I can
think of:
 * for all objects with natural=wood, add landcover=trees
 * for all objects with landuse=forest, add landcover=trees

There is no information loss because anyway if the land was tagged
properly before, it still will after, and no tag are removed.

Then tools can be adapted to generate and render landcover=trees instead
of landuse=forest. And finally landuse=forest can be deprecated and
replaced by landuse=forestry where it makes sense.

The point being, here the important mass-retaggings are only adding tags
to already-tagged objects, so there is nothing lost by the change.