[Tagging] is the wiki descriptive or prescriptive?

[Sebastian Gürtler]

Just a few comments why I love osm much more than e.g. wikipedia...

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
- and surprisingly much software getting along with this...
>    * 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
- the instability is quite also a kind of flexibility. It is a bit like
any living being which carries instability but possibility for changes
in itself.
>    * absolutely no control on quality (of anything: tagging schema,
> data itself, even general direction)
That is not true - I think the broad variety of analysis tools serve as
a kind of quality control. (May be just in a broader sense)
>    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)
And this is the point why I had to smile, nearly laugh out loud... Yes,
our government opens some data - so anyone can see that the quality of
many things is much worse than in osm... And sometimes they just use
openstreetmap... (I speak of Germany - with any district of course doing
his own thing...)
>    * 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.

I hope OSM will last, but this of course is just a wish, I just hope
that my analogy with the life doesn't mean that it has to die too soon.
I agree that there is a risk. But I was just several times very
disappointed in wikipedia where there is more control and moderation,
that it can be very difficult to correct even uncritical, unpolitical,
trivial but wrong information if you can't cite a publication that is
immediately available for anyone online... stability and homogenity also
don't guarantee usability.

> P.S. Wiki is just a reflection of all this mentioned above.
>
Yes, complicated pieces of literature...

Sebastian