[Tagging] New page "Approval status" for "de facto", "in use", "approved" etc

Christoph Hormann osm at imagico.de
Sun Jul 28 13:37:23 UTC 2019


On Sunday 28 July 2019, Joseph Eisenberg wrote:
>
> Christoph, do you have any ideas about how we could be more inclusive
> and make it easier for mappers from other countries to create and
> document new tags?

I think emphasizing and reaffirming the fact that the wiki is to 
document the de facto use and meaning of tags and openly documenting 
and explaining contradictions, ambiguities and regional differences in 
tagging rather than hiding them to present a subjectively desired 
reality of tagging would be a good approach.

If the wiki documents the de facto use and meaning of tags that would 
automatically give different language versions of the documentation 
equal standing because all of them aim to document the same thing.  If 
however the wiki aims to document the supposed meaning of tags there 
will inevitably be a struggle for opinion leadership on what this 
supposed meaning is to be and this struggle will inevitably be 
dominated by the English language.

What i specifically think is not a good idea is intermixing the formal 
status of a proposal in the proposal process 
('draft', 'proposed', 'voting', 'approved' and 'rejected') with either 
objective and verifiable classifications of the actual use of tags and 
subjective recommendations if a certain tag should or should not be 
used.

> I hoped that by better defining the "de facto" status and defining a
> clear way that a tag can be promoted to this value (which currently
> is honored with a green highlighting, just like "approved"), there
> could be an objective and fair way for "in use" tags to be added to
> Map Features without going through the Proposal process.

I don't think there is a reasonable verifiable way to define a 
sub-classification among tags that are widely accepted to be used with 
a certain meaning but that have never successfully gone through a 
proposal process.  If there was a way to do this it would probably be 
possible to automatically determine this and show such status in 
taginfo (although if that involves the historic development that might 
be technically challenging).

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



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