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

[Christoph Hormann]

> Anders Torger <anders at torger.se> hat am 22.12.2020 11:28 geschrieben:
> 
> OSM is a geodatabase, with a design that makes some geodata suitable for it, others less so. [...]

To make this clear, in particular also for those who might be idly reading this and could get the wrong impression:

While OSM is also a geo-database it is foremost a project of cooperation between people from very different parts of the world with different cultural backgrounds and different views and perception.

The reason why we have the principle of verifiability and many of us put strong emphasis on sticking to it is not technical but social in nature.  OSM lacks the social mechanisms to create and maintain non-verifiable information in a globally uniform database without abandoning the principle of egalitarian cooperation across language and culture barriers in favor of a social and cultural hierarchy like in Wikipedia.

See also what i wrote in

https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2020-December/056829.html

as well as what i wrote more than two years ago meanwhile in:

http://blog.imagico.de/verifiability-and-the-wikipediarization-of-openstreetmap/

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