[Tagging] is the wiki descriptive or prescriptive?

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 16.11.21 16:52, joost schouppe wrote:
> 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.

Yes, but if the tag is not documented, then there is no guarantee that
everyone who uses the tag actually means the same thing by it. Or in a
word-mincing way, it might be frequently used but not in a "common" fashion!

So whoever documents that has some duty of care here, and should not
simply add whatever *they* think something means to the wiki and hope to
breeze along because "this tag is used to frequently".

Also, regarding pure "numbers of use", 40k occurrences of something can
easily be the result of some import or mass edit where one single
(perhaps misguided) person is responsible for 39.5k. So that's also
something to look at before you go "ha, this is a well established tag".

Meaning, at least putting something like this before a slightly wider
audience is not the worst idea.

> Then I tried to add it in a
> descriptive-somewhat-discouraging-way and was promptly reverted by
> another contributor.

I don't necessarily think that something that has not been through a
vote but is widely used (with the above caveats) needs to be "somewhat
discouraged".

> 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.

A potential outcome of a discussion could be "ouch, this was a silly
import 10 years ago, let's delete these tags from OSM completely" which
would then make further discussion about documenting them unnecessary ;)

> 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. 

But do you understand enough of the topic, and how the existing 40.000
mentions have entered OSM, to make a solid statement about "describing
how this tag is used"? I wouldn't, without further research.

> 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'm with you on this particular edit but I can easily think of edits
that other people would like to make ("some mappers prefer XYZ tagging
because of the ABC advantage but others disagree") where I would be more
skeptical, especially where "some mappers" is just them and their three
industrious friends. If it is indeed widely used by a large number of
people, and there is reason to believe that they actually all mean the
same thing by using it, and it's not just one person's fault (by making
an import, automated edit, or editor preset) that these are popping up,
then yeah, should be documented.

A prior discussion can help to get this right, instead of accidentally
adding one's own view to the wiki and claiming it was common use.

Bye
Frederik

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