[Tagging] motorcycle:scale

[Christoph Hormann]

On Monday 04 February 2019, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>
> * invent keys - ok
>
> * document widely used/established keys that never went through a
> proposal process - ok
>
> * invent keys and document them as if they were widely used or
> established - questionable
>
> * the whole thing done by someone who has in the past unilaterally
> documented their personal preferred tagging on the wiki, then made
> mechanical edits to push it through, and when challenged in changeset
> comments, cited the wiki pages they had edited themselves as an
> authority - ...

While i agree on this particular case your distinction can be easily 
misread to mean that mappers must not invent new keys or that they have 
to write a proposal for them.

The reason i am emphasizing this is diversity.  People in 
underrepresented parts of the world will much more often run across 
things for which no established tagging exists than we do - yet they 
have comparitively little chances to have such tag established or to 
bring through a proposal for them.  And creating a additional hurdle 
for this by banning documentation of their tag from normal tag 
documentation (and therefore from showing up in taginfo, possibly also 
in editors etc.) is counterproductive.

We already have way too many cases where mapping in parts of the world 
with a geography very different from that in Europe and North America 
people cargo cult a European geography - essentially drawing the map to 
create a look-alike of a European setting.  Telling people they either 
have to use established European tagging or they have bury the 
documentation of their tags somewhere where no one can accidently find 
them is not helping with that.

Note in the vast majority of cases we are talking about new tags, not 
new keys.  But allowing documentation of new tags but not of new keys 
would be kind of weired of course.

My suggestion:  Create a new status value for the info box "not 
established" that is to be used whenever a tag has less than 500 uses 
and less than 20 active users.  And highlight such tags with a 
prominent warning that this tag is a new invention not yet broadly 
accepted.

There by the way is also another side to the whole subject - that is 
established tags with lots of uses for which there is only a proposal 
page.  That is bad because a proposal page by definition describes an 
idea how a tag is supposed to be used while a tag page should describe 
how a tag is used.  And even if at some point a wiki editor creates a 
tag page this is often with content copied from the proposal without 
checking if actual tag use is in line with that.  Encouraging to create 
proposal pages instead of tag pages when inventing tags essentially 
encourages wishful thinking about the meaning of tags instead of actual 
documentation of the reality of use.

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