[Tagging] Feature Proposal - RFC - Discouraging the use of deprecated schemes

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

the reason that the wording on the wiki is usually weak is that there is 
only a handful of people who control what goes on the wiki and this 
handful of people does not have authority.

A handful of people deciding that "we would recommend to use another tag 
instead of this one" is just about acceptable.

A handful of people saying (and I quote your draft) "It is highly 
discouraged to use or interpret this tag" crosses a line.

Who are we here on the tagging list - who are those 20 or 30 who might 
participate in a vote - to decree that something is "highly discouraged"?

If you want to go down this route then you need to drop the 
authoritative "it is discouraged" language and instead say: "The 
following group of 30 people think that you should not be using this tag 
any more", with a link to the vote. (And allow others to add a banner 
that says "and here's another 30 who think differently").

This tagging list and the whole wiki voting system are good enough to 
make (weak) recommendations, but they are not good enough to "highly 
discourage" anything or make binding decisions. Before doing that you 
need to overhaul the whole mechanism that would lead to such a "highly 
discouraged" verdict. You would have to ensure that people from all over 
OSM could participate in the discussion and vote (including those who 
don't speak English).

I don't think this is a proposal that can even go forward. The group of 
people that would eventually be voting does not have the authority to 
make that decision. If this vote were carried through and you were to 
put a "highly discouraged" banner on every page that describes a 
deprecated feature, I might have to put another banner on top of that 
which says "the wording of the following banner is disputed in the OSM 
community".

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"