[Tagging] is the wiki descriptive or prescriptive?

[stevea]

Speaking of “unholy mix” regarding wiki being prescriptive vs. descriptive (thank you, Minh, that’s quite accurate!), several years ago Minh and I actually wrote / contributed to TWO wikis on very much the same topic:  USA admin_level tagging.  Mine [1] (well, I certainly wasn’t the only author, rather a “major coordinator” or maybe “herder of cats") was rather prescriptive and bordered on (heh) being almost an academic / historical / political treatise that droned on and on with a complex (yet simplified!) giant wiki-table and literally dozens and dozens of footnotes.  While Minh’s [2] is nicely user-friendly and rather descriptive, even calling itself “a basic tagging guide” as it describes “tagging practices that are already in wide use."  Importantly, both wikis link and refer to each other:  one describes the other as “simpler and novice-friendly” while the other points back to the first if the reader wishes “more detail.”  I recall somewhere in our discussion as / while we completed these the idea that “there can certainly be more than one book in the library about a topic” ringing true with the community; this was true then and it remains true today.  I consider these two wiki articles — one quite prescriptive, one quite descriptive — to be one of the better solutions our wiki found to what seemed like a vexing problem.  No, it simply benefited by two articles, and we said so.

Another “unholy mix” of this is [3], where for the USA's federal / national sections, the wiki specifically says it is trying to be more prescriptive (“how we SHOULD tag”) rather than actually do — this is the whole idea of “getting better national data about public lands in the USA into our map.”  Yet further down in the very same wiki, the state-by-state section actually requests that a table be better completed (and it has, slowly) with absolutely DEscriptive styles of tagging in each state of the country, completely the opposite of the earlier sections of the very same wiki!

What is important in both cases is that we identify the differences right in the text of the wiki itself between descriptive and prescriptive and say which one of the two we are using in that context.  That isn’t always done, nor is there always so flagrant an example of contending “this here, that there” differences as in the above example.  But our wiki gets very good service when we are clear about how a particular page or section of wiki is written.  I’m not saying “do this everywhere,” as in many places, it is clear that “this is how we already tag” (and examples, table, photos with actual “tag like this” are given…) and in many OTHER places, it is a bit less exampled and “we strive to tag like this in the future as an ideal…” (prescriptive) is clear without being explicitly stated (though it could be).

Add a little clarity with these two simple words (descriptive and prescriptive) where it makes sense to do so.  This goes a long way in making our wiki more helpful, readable and authoritative.  Our wiki IS a reference, but it can also act as a “wish list” of “it sure would be nice if folks tagged like THIS, even if we don’t as of today."

SteveA

[1] https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/United_States_admin_level
[2] https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/United_States/Boundaries
[3] https://wiki.osm.org/wiki/United_States/Public_lands