[Tagging] solving iD conflict (was: pointlessly inflamatory title)

[Kevin Kenny]

On Thu, May 23, 2019 at 7:39 PM Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:
> In general, our project isn't a top-down strictly managed project with a
> controlled decision-making process. This means that many things have to
> be discussed over and over, and the community generally doesn't speak
> with one voice. But this also gives us some resilience; there's no one
> "tag central command" that someone could take over and dictate what we
> are to do.

I think at the root of the complaints in this thread is the idea -
justified or not - that the maintainers of iD are attempting to
arrogate that role unto themselves.

To the extent that they are, it is probably because the discussion
forums on tagging - at least, this list - are too cacophonous to
inform their decisions about what tags to present in iD.  Where
consensus fails here - as, in my experience, it almost always does for
any question that isn't answerable by tagging that was well
established years before I got here - the iD developers are really
faced with the decision: implement some arbitrary choice that makes
sense to them, or do nothing about helping iD users to map the feature
in question.

That matches my experience with mapping. On the few occasions that
I've asked a tagging question in here, any useful answers are lost in
a din of conflicting opinions. That's fine if the sole purpose of the
mailing list is to explore the tagging strategy - it is by talking
these things to death, over and over, that consensus is built -
painfully slowly. In the meantime, I run the opinions through the
mental filters of "what do they have in common" and "what from among
the rest makes sense to *me*?" and map my feature accordingly. I'd
imagine that the iD team is forced to employ a similar process.

So far I've gotten away with it. If anyone complains, I can retag. If
anyone reverts, I can leave the feature unmapped. Obviously, though,
my tagging affects only the relatively small fraction of OSM's
features that I map, while iD's tagging has a much bigger impact.
That's why nobody takes me to task for rogue tagging, while iD appears
constantly to be under fire.

I'm not sure it's fixable. We need both the passionate argument about
the right way to do things, and someone who can decide for each tool
what that tool will consider to be the best current practice. Those
who get angry at not getting their way will get angry. If the mailing
list is to serve as a debating forum for what tagging practice ought
to be in the medium or far future - a function that is needed - it
will not be very effective at informing anyone of best
_current_practice. They're slightly different jobs, and we're not very
good at separating them. Even Overpass and taginfo queries seem to be
more effective at determining whether a tag is accepted in current
practice, and of course we all know that has to be taken with a grain
of salt.