[Tagging] Feature Proposal - Rejected - shrubbery V2

[Christoph Hormann]

On Tuesday 17 August 2021, Vincent van Duijnhoven wrote:
> The current proposal voting system seems insufficient to resolve this
> issue. [...]

This is a common misunderstanding of the proposal system - it is not 
meant to produce authoritive decisions on tagging through voting.  The 
voting step of the proposal process is meant to be a method to gauge 
consensus.  That is why it is not just a supermajority vote but it 
explicitly says that the dissenting voices and their reasoning are to 
be taken into account.

The main purpose of the proposal process is to provide a process for 
mappers to gather feedback on tagging ideas and to improve them with 
the help of this feedback in an organized fashion.  That is why it is a 
bit unfortunate that you indicated on the talk page of the proposal:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Proposed_features/shrubbery

most of the comments made to be 'resolved' - communicating that the 
comments provided are no more significant (which they of course still 
are).  

Now that two proposals trying to improve the 'medium high woody 
vegetation' tagging subject in different ways were rejected just means 
that there is no consensus on this question among the mappers 
participating in the proposal process at this time.  Which is perfectly 
normal.

A huge part of the problem of developing consensus on tagging stems from 
the lack of a common knowledge basis among mappers about the meaning of 
tags currently used.  And that largely is the result of the conflict 
between those among the wiki editors who want tagging documentation to 
reflect the supposed meaning of tags (in their own view) and those who 
try to document the de facto meaning of tags based on how they are 
actually used.  Interestingly that latent conflict also raises its head 
here w.r.t. natural=shrubbery.  Until a few days ago the wiki page for 
that tag for the most part reflected - as i commented - quite 
accurately the (low volume) de facto use of the tag in a quite concise 
fashion that showed promise the tag could be more broadly adopted in 
that sense by mappers:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Tag:natural%3Dshrubbery&oldid=2187161

Since then however the page has been 'enriched' with various ideas 
for 'ought to be' tagging like the maintained=* values that have been 
proposed (and criticized in the proposal process as being vague and 
non-verifiable) and that currently have zero use in the database:

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:natural%3Dshrubbery

This (the widespread use of the wiki for people to subjectively describe 
how they want tagging to be and as a result the lack of a consistent 
documentation of the actual de facto meaning of tags) is a big problem 
hampering not only data users and mappers but also also negatively 
affecting consensus building among mappers regarding new tagging ideas 
as demonstrated by these two proposals.

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