[Tagging] motorcycle:scale

Kevin Kenny kevin.b.kenny at gmail.com
Wed Feb 6 00:02:27 UTC 2019


On Tue, Feb 5, 2019 at 5:56 PM Graeme Fitzpatrick <graemefitz1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> What concerns me a bit, is that there are 750000+ OSM mappers, which is great! But it would seem that there are only ~50 (? - someone would know) members of "Tagging", with only ~20 of those being active (which I would call contributing to list discussions more than once a week). So 20 of us are deciding which tags 750000 mappers should use, & pretty well have the vote of life or death to new proposals!

The vast majority of those mappers are inactive, maybe one in ten or
twenty actually maps regularly.  And the vast majority of those 40000
or so are entirely content to map features for which good existing
tagging exists. Only a handful of us are actually interesting in
pushing the frontier of what is mappable. That's not necessarily
alarming.

> I know the list is open for anyone to subscribe to, & join in discussions as they see fit, but I'd think that a lot of newbie mappers would have a read of the occasionally strident, & sometimes scathing, comments made towards proposals here & think, Woah, I'm not going in there! :-(

Yeah.  I stick around because I'm an open-sourcerer from way back, and
have already come to understand that having the first reaction to a
proposal be a chorus of 'it s*ks'  (where the asterisk, is of course,
replaced by 'tin' ;))  is high praise. It indicates that what you're
doing is important enough to capture the attention and excite the
passion of commenters - and that it's near enough the mark that
they're willing to tell you how to improve it.  The real killer is the
people who smile and tell you 'very nice.' They don't care.

Frankly, I've found no forum in which it's possible to get sound
tagging advice - if I can't find something for myself on the Wiki,
taginfo, overpass, etc., I'm better off sending private mail to a few
other, more experienced, mappers whom I trust. It's not worth the
effort of discussing any new ideas on this list until I have not only
a well-fleshed-out proposal, but also some experience with mapping the
feature in question. (And I will confess to being less than assiduous
about wikifying what I've done.)

There are people who are profoundly uncomfortable with the way that a
'folksonomy' works, or who are also data consumers who are acutely
aware of the limitations of such a process in terms of getting usable
data in a repeatable representation. For this reason, uniform tagging
is important - but we have a history of achieving that through the
messy and inconsistent 'bottom up' process and the principle of 'he
who does the work makes the rules.' A 'top-down' process where some
data analyst or small team prescribes the tagging would no doubt have
resulted in a tidier and more consistent model - but it would likely
have let to a more limited one, with less mapper engagement. Moreover,
it would have embodied the cultural assumptions of the people who
created it, and struggle to model features that do not exist or are
very different in another culture.

The messy 'wiki-style' process, I think, yields more robust results in
the long run, but $LC_DEITY, it's painful to participate in. ("Those
who eat sausage and respect the law should not watch either one being
made," and making data models is very like making laws.) It's
important for all participants to remember just how much everyone's
patience is strained, and try to be gentle.



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