[Tagging] is the wiki descriptive or prescriptive?

[stevea]

The "sweet spot" of "the wiki is both" IS difficult to both articulate and achieve.  As I have said, it really is a "reference tome of how we tag" (or do things), so therefore "descriptive" — the great majority of the time.  AT TIMES, and we can do better to separate and identify these sections, it is prescriptive, as I called it "a wish-list for better, future tagging."  Both have their place, although I think it is much more common and even helpful for the wiki to be descriptive the great majority of the time (90% / 10% or so?, maybe 95% / 5%?)  A key concept I keep repeating is that if it makes sense for a wiki section to be prescriptive, SAY SO right there in the wiki, as it adds clarity and transparency and we can use more of that.

Also, while it is far from ideal, can be tedious to "wade through" and would take a fair bit of re-work to improve (a whole new wiki software that uses this concept as a design goal?), the "problem" of "who wrote this?" and "should I trust the authorship of this?" isn't so much a problem (as we have the History tab to record all edits to a wiki page) as it is a cumbersome way to view these data.  If there were a button-link that produced a brief view of what sections of a page had which authorship (I know, this is a dream and rather fuzzily-described here), people viewing that could determine for themselves "how much authority" (or trust, or believability, or other benchmarks) they might ascribe to any particular wiki page.  What we have isn't perfect by a long shot, but it does allow us to stumble through the entire History of a page, and that is something, not nothing.

Just like authors become well-known, well-loved and well-believed by their readership in the real world for fiction and non-fiction, authorship in our wiki takes on similar "provenance by well-known authors" (or lesser-known authors, to be sure).  It really does happen that some people both write well and become respected as "reasonably authoritative" as time goes on and wiki documentation matures.  We shouldn't kid ourselves that this process happens and try to ignore it away as "elitism," when it isn't, it is rather "leading by good example."

Just as Wikipedia has its "Gold Star" articles, we might consider selecting a few exceedingly exemplary pages in OSM's wiki to showcase what we consider our best, definitive uses of this critical project infrastructure.

SteveA