[Tagging] Facts and opinions

[Andy Townsend]

On 09/01/2019 19:03, Bryan Housel wrote:
> It’s not documentation.  It’s just a bunch of prescriptive advice by 
> random people.  Most of the people involved don’t even work on 
> software.  They’re just really into tagging and arguing, and I don’t 
> have time for it.
>

At its worst its that, sure - but it's not fair to denigrate the people 
who've put a lot of effort into trying to make it into good 
documentation (off the top of my head Harry Wood is just one example of 
some of the people making a real effort here; Wolfgang from higher up 
the thread is another).

I'm also not convinced about "most of the people involved don’t even 
work on software" - writing documentation is a very different skill to 
writing software, and I've met plenty of people who are excellent at one 
and are dire at the other (and that works both ways around).

One of the problems with the wiki is that inherently "the last editor 
has the last say" - nuances felt by previous editors to be important can 
easily get lost.  Good wiki editors try very hard to avoid that problem; 
bad ones don't recognise it.  The question is - is there an 
alternative?  Obviously there are things like the help site and taginfo 
that provide parts of what used to be provided by the wiki, but better 
(and I think that the de-emphasising of the wiki on osm.org that 
happened a while ago made a lot of sense) but I can't really think of an 
alternative for info such as "with this tag this is what people have had 
to think about over the years, this (compromise) is where we are now" 
and so on.

Best Regards,

Andy