[Tagging] Facts and opinions

[Warin]

On 10/01/19 10:13, Tobias Knerr wrote:
> On 07.01.19 16:12, Bryan Housel wrote:
>
>> I encourage everyone to just disregard everything that’s on the wiki and go by what taginfo says as far as how the tags are used and what the accepted values are.
> The wiki is an invaluable source for understanding OSM tagging, and I
> use it all the time during mapping and when coding software that works
> with OSM data.
>
> Taginfo is an awesome resource as well, and I use it almost daily, but
> it cannot fully replace the wiki. It tells you that foo=bar has been
> used thousands of times, but it doesn't tell you what that tag means¹.
> It also doesn't tell you about the conventions for its use (default
> values, directionality, lots of other essential details). Ultimately,
> Taginfo isn't documentation – the wiki is.

+1.

Taginfo does not tell me what landuse=clearing is. It only tells me there is some of use of it.

There is no wiki page on it so there is no help there.

The next thing to do is contact the mappers.. tried that .. one response told me to go to another channel - did that, nothing worth while.

Contact a mapper .. no response there either ...
Best I can do then is use my brain to think about the words and the mapping context to come up with what I think they meant by it.
My conclusion is - if it is not documented on the wiki .. it does not exist.


>
> Besides documenting current tagging practice, the wiki is also a useful
> tool for coordinating and spreading new ideas (even though the specifics
> of the process can be controversial at times). If you're not a software
> developer or one of a few highly respected community members,
> discussions on community channels and wiki proposals are pretty much
> your only good options to make your genius tagging idea known to the
> world. Without this first step, that idea is unlikely to get enough
> traction to even show up in Taginfo to a meaningful extent: Using the
> tag yourself only gets you so far.

The wiki also help differentiate between things that are close in appearance to the casual mapper.

Things like a netball court can be mapped as a basketball court, until you can see the difference and that is on OSM wiki pages.

>
> For all these reasons, I consider the wiki a key asset to our project.
> As a result, I spend a lot of time improving it, as do many other
> community members. It hurts to see that some developers of core OSM
> infrastructure seemingly value these contributions so little. To me,
> people discussing and documenting our data model are a vital part of our
> community. So are software developers, of course! It's my belief that
> the project can only thrive if there's mutual respect between these groups.
>
> Tobias
>
>
> ¹ Taginfo actually does provide a definition, but that's because it
> extracts them from wiki pages.
>
>