[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - holy well

[Paul Allen]

On Fri, 19 Feb 2021 at 13:01, Martin Koppenhoefer <dieterdreist at gmail.com>
wrote:

> Am Fr., 19. Feb. 2021 um 12:39 Uhr schrieb Paul Allen <pla16021 at gmail.com
> >:
>
> We know you are strongly voicing this strict meaning of "historic" every
> now and then
>

It's not because I have a great interest in the detailed minutiae of
history.
I don't.


> (and someone followed suite and changed the wiki accordingly),
>

I consider that change to be unwise.  I don't think a broad consensus has
been established here.


> but for OSM tags, I would not expect it to have much bearing. Things
> tagged with "historic" are as much historic as "amenity" is about amenities.
>

Precisely.  That is, sadly, how things are.  Tags get created that don't
make a lot of sense.  There's a wiki page about tags that are
counter-intuitive (in some cases I'd call them perverse).

We can never stop mappers creating bad key/value pairs, because
"any tag you like."  I wondered if it was at least possible to steer this
list towards more consistent interpretations of one key that seemed to
have little room for interpretation.

Yes, the wiki is descriptive rather than prescriptive.  English dictionaries
are descriptive rather than prescriptive, and that is how "cleave"
became its own antonym.  It would be nice if we could avoid
ending up with more nonsensical tags than sensible ones.

Any wayside cross is tagged with the "historic" key, not just those that
> are of exceptional significance. We do (did) not make this distinction.
>

Precisely.  Somebody couldn't think up a better tag, or did not consider new
wayside crosses, and so decided that since the ones (s)he was thinking
of were old, that counted as historic.  As an organic coinage (if it was)
that was regrettable.  As a mailing list with a lot of experience between
us, we ought to be able to be more consistent.  I know we can't fix past
mistakes but I had hoped we could stop repeating the same mistakes we
made before.

-- 
Paul
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