[Tagging] is the wiki descriptive or prescriptive?

[joost schouppe]

Hi,

In my opinion, the wiki is for describing tags, with an underlying
assumption that you encourage good practices and discourage bad ones. When
a tag is commonly used, it should be added to the wiki. It might then be a
good idea to highlight the fact that the tag is not the original intention
of the proposal, or perhaps never went through a proposal process at all.

Even if you consider the wiki to be mostly prescriptive, there should IMHO
still be a place to describe how people actually map. Add disclaimers if
you like, but don't pretend it does not exist. I think it is always a good
idea to describe the data in OSM in the wiki, and that removing things from
the wiki just because you disagree with the practice is wrong. Edge cases
might apply.

Case in point, there's over 40.000
generator:output:electricity=small_installation mapped (
https://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/generator%3Aoutput%3Aelectricity#values
). I have tried to add that in a descriptive-not-prescriptive way to the
wiki, and was promptly reverted. Then I tried to add it in a
descriptive-somewhat-discouraging-way and was promptly reverted by another
contributor.

See the history at
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Key:generator:output&action=history

The last revert asked to "Discuss this first.". So here's  that discussion.

Note that for me the discussion is *not* about whether or not
"small_installation" is a good value for the key, but rather whether it is
OK or not to mention a commonly used value on a wiki page. About whether or
not it is OK to simply revert edits to the wiki that try to do this. Since
that discussion is hardly relevant to the wiki page itself, I did not add
this to the Discussion page of that article. I'd be totally fine with the
other contributors to add very discouraging words.

I don't feel that for these edits I should have discussed them before
editing. I agree that on some pages that would be a good idea. For cases
where you simply describe how a tag is used that is not necessary, in my
opinion. Especially if you also add that not everyone thinks this is a good
idea. The burden of discussing-before-changing should in this case be on
the ones who wish to remove this info - not the ones that wish to add it.

I have the feeling that what I describe above is close to a consensus
opinion of what the wiki is for. I was a little surprised that we don't
seem to document anywhere how exactly we use the wiki. That must be
confusing for both data users and wiki contributors. But maybe I missed
something obvious (that happens).

Best,
Joost Schouppe
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