[Tagging] is the wiki descriptive or prescriptive?

[Tomas Straupis]

2021-11-17, tr, 18:21 marcos-martinez rašė:
> The sad thing for me is that if all of the above was strictly true our database would be
> a chaos nobody could work with due to its inconsistency. Strangely, this is not happening.

  Well, if you mention inconsistency... When compared to what was
available (open) at the time of creation of OSM, OSM was the most
(only) consistent global dataset available.
  But almost 20 years have passed. And there are some important
downsides of OSM dataset which are becoming clear:
  * data heterogeneity - different regions have different
understanding of even the same tags
  * data instability - tagging schema could be stable, settled, do the
job at one point and then it could suddenly be changed by anybody
without any experience and without any good reason
  * absolutely no control on quality (of anything: tagging schema,
data itself, even general direction)

  And at the same time we have:
  * governments opening their data at a very fast pace, and their data
is homogenous - stable and very usable (curated by professionals with
a clear knowledge on how and where the data is used)
  * other global datasets are emerging. look at natural earth dataset
(yes, it is for the time being for small scale maps only), but they've
learned OSM mistakes very well: they DO accept anybody to map, but
results are curated by professionals and new mappers are prepared
before doing anything. You can get more details on this in a number of
this years NACIS presentations.

  So make no mistake. Community is important, but if that means
allowing anybody to destroy the quality of the data with no control -
it will not last long. There are other emerging means of collecting at
least general/georeferencing/base data (road/water network, landcover,
buildings, places etc.) which are way more consistent, verifiable,
stable and homogenic - therefore much more usable - than OSM.

P.S. Wiki is just a reflection of all this mentioned above.

-- 
Tomas