[Tagging] [OSM-talk] Document personal tags in Proposed_features/ space, User: space, or Tag:/Key: space?

Joseph Eisenberg joseph.eisenberg at gmail.com
Sun Aug 25 22:18:13 UTC 2019


While some have suggested that uses of the landuse=* key like
landuse=grass, landuse=village_green and landuse=recreation_area lead
to misuse of the landuse=* key, the landcover=* key appears to be even
more problematic.

A newer user, Henke54, has continued to create new pages like
Tag:landcover=dunes -
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:landcover%3Ddunes (instead of
Tag:natural=dune), Tag:landcover=water (instead of natural=water),
Tag:landcover=hedge (instead of barrier=hedge) and
Tag:landcover=greenery (meant for all types of vegetation? Or
shrubberies? Flower beds?) in the Tag: space.

I think this shows that the concept of "landcover" is not clear even
among users who promote this key over the established keys for
vegetation and landform features (eg natural=*).

What should we do with a page like Tag:landcover=dunes? I already
tried adding a mention that natural=dune was more common and mentioned
on the Talk page that "dune" is a landform, not a landcover, but this
was reverted.

On 8/16/19, Joseph Eisenberg <joseph.eisenberg at gmail.com> wrote:
>> " it would probably be a lot of work to do this practically"
>
> That's never stopped me before! :-)
>
>> Take all tagging documentation from the wiki no matter where it is and
>> remove everything that is not strictly documenting the de facto meaning of
>> tags in the OSM database the result
> would be a pretty compact body of documentation.
>
> Are you suggesting making Tag: or Key: pages for all of the proposed
> tags/keys which are being used? That sounds like a lot of work.
>
> Wouldn't it be easier to mark crazy/theoretical/bad/abandoned
> proposals as "abandoned" and archive them, and then make it easier to
> search the wiki, including all the proposed features, rather than
> moving them all to a different wiki namespace?
>
> Or perhaps you are suggesting going through the current Tag: and Key:
> pages and removing all of the non-factual information, including some
> pages which are opinion or recommendations.
>
> While this would make a few of the pages shorter, it wouldn't
> significantly reduce the number of pages or the number of tags and
> keys documented in the wiki. Just the Map Features page alone, which
> is only a small subset of the documented tags and keys, is quite
> lengthy at the moment, and it's just descriptions of each approved or
> de facto tag (plus a few others that are in use)
>
> On 8/16/19, Christoph Hormann <osm at imagico.de> wrote:
>>
>> The problem about proposal pages is that they can be infinitely
>> theoretical, non-verifiable or outright insane.  So telling a mapper
>> who is thinking about inventing a new tag to search the proposals if
>> there is one that already covers what they want to do is not
>> practicable.  Because even if there is a proposal that deals with the
>> same kind of situation the mapper is confronted with that does not mean
>> the proposal contains a practicable idea of how to tag this.
>>
>> The advisable approach to making tag documentation on the wiki better
>> usable is IMO not to further blur the line between documentation of the
>> de facto meaning of tags by humans and all the other uses of the wiki
>> (like proposals, automatically assembled data etc.) but more strictly
>> separating them.  If you (theoretically - it would probably be a lot of
>> work to do this practically) take all tagging documentation from the
>> wiki no matter where it is and remove everything that is not strictly
>> documenting the de facto meaning of tags in the OSM database the result
>> would be a pretty compact body of documentation.
>>
>> --
>> Christoph Hormann
>> http://www.imagico.de/
>>
>> _______________________________________________
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>> Tagging at openstreetmap.org
>> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
>>
>



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