[Tagging] Fuzzy areas again: should we have them or not?

[Anders Torger]

I forgot to comment this. Just want to make sure that there is no 
misunderstanding: this is not primarily about labeling the Alps or the 
Atlantic or the Sahara desert.

It's mainly about making rural and outdoor maps useful for a local 
context. Maps that hikers, mountaineers and hunters use when moving 
about in nature away from roads and residential areas.

OSM can indeed continue to make huge progress in urban areas and car 
navigation etc without ever caring about making outdoor maps. And if 
that is what we want, that's fine. But if we actually do want the OSM 
data to *also* be used as a basis for outdoor maps away from the streets 
(and not just for an illustrative purpose, but for real use), we are 
crippling it by not having methods to map these names in a proper way. 
For outdoor and rural areas being able to work in an overview manner is 
also more important, as areas are huge, wide space between features, 
which makes simple point mapping place=locality style not work well.

But it all boils down to, do we want to support these type of maps or 
not.

/Anders

On 2020-12-21 13:57, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> Please stop trying to frame this as "cartographers have a right to 
> abuse
> the data model, and if someone doesn't want that, they need to present 
> a
> viable alternative". We've come very far in OSM without such abuse and 
> I
> don't see why it should suddenly be introduced.