[Tagging] is the wiki descriptive or prescriptive?

Christoph Hormann osm at imagico.de
Wed Nov 17 16:49:31 UTC 2021


On Wednesday 17 November 2021, Andy Townsend wrote:
> > The way you formulate your question: "Is the wiki descriptive or
> > prescriptive?" is already part of the problem.  My answer to that
> > question would be:  The wiki is neither because there is no
> > consensus on what it*should*  be.
>
> I'd ask "what should it be" and more importantly "what do we need to
> do to get from here to there"?

As i said - it is a dilemma.  Both the descriptive and the prescriptive 
use of the wiki have legitimacy and are potentially useful.  I have no 
solution for this that clearly is the golden way to move forward.  

A fairly manifest idea would be to properly separate the two uses of the 
wiki to avoid both goals competing within the same body of text.  But 
you need to keep in mind that this would not fully solve the problems 
because for people with a certain conviction on how things should be 
tagged there is always an incentive to selectively present the de facto 
use of the tag in a way that supports how things should be.  A way to 
mitigate that and to create more credibility for tagging documentation 
could be to move away from the relatively anonymous presentation of 
content on the wiki more towards a collection of clearly attributed 
statements and analysis on tagging.  This way readers could weigh what 
they read in the tagging documentation with the credibility and merit 
of those who have written it.  I do not know how practically feasible 
that is though.

-- 
Christoph Hormann
https://www.imagico.de/



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