[Tagging] is the wiki descriptive or prescriptive?

François Lacombe fl.infosreseaux at gmail.com
Tue Nov 16 16:20:33 UTC 2021


Hi Joost

Thank you for coming here and making these points.

To me and very simply, key/values pages are prescriptive and project /
topic pages are descriptive.
Especially when the first is reviewed.

In practice, generator:output page gives guidelines and we'd better make it
compliant with Any tag you like principles (i.e a single concept for each
key).

Local power generation projects can describe some different
practices/guidelines due to local context (see bottom of this page).
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Power_generation

Were you aware of this last link?

Best regards

François

Le mar. 16 nov. 2021 à 16:56, joost schouppe <joost.schouppe at gmail.com> a
écrit :

> 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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