[Tagging] is the wiki descriptive or prescriptive?

Christoph Hormann osm at imagico.de
Thu Nov 18 12:05:21 UTC 2021


On Thursday 18 November 2021, Minh Nguyen wrote:
> > 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.
>
> Separating the wiki's contents by their aim is a great idea.

My idea was actually more to separate the two uses into distinct 
projects each with their own editing culture and conventions.  Within 
the same wiki people with strong convictions how things ought to be 
tagged will always try to push their point of view across the whole 
wiki.

> Mappers 
> need more "feature pages" like [1][2][3] that give a broader view of
> how to map something from start to finish, named after a real-world
> concept rather than a particular tag that the mapper has to identify
> as the primary feature tag beforehand.

That is quite precisely the opposite of my second suggestion.  The 
feature pages follow the idea of uniform story-telling.  As stevea well 
illustrated with his example this can work very well within a fairly 
homogeneous cultural context.  But what this thread is about at its 
core is that this does not work on the wiki at large because we lack 
(for good reasons) consensus on what the purpose of the wiki is at a 
very fundamental level.

> As Mateusz points out, there's already a mechanism to support a claim
> by citing some analysis off-wiki that can be attributed to an
> individual if necessary.

Yes, but that only works if the information you like to cite is already 
written down somewhere.  And as i mentioned already:

> As a result of this most meaningful information on the actual use of
> tags in OSM is in the minds of people knowledgeable in the respective
> fields of tagging

If you want the community to produce substantially better tagging 
documentation (either descriptive or prescriptive) you need to make it 
more attractive for those who have the competence to produce this to 
contribute in a way they find attractive.  And to be clear - this is 
not just me projecting my own feelings, this is based on talking to 
many people who almost universally say:  I don't like putting down what 
i know about tagging on the wiki because all too frequently someone 
else will immediately change what i write to reflect their subjective 
view of how things should be.

> But attributing individuals -- even noted 
> experts in the OSMian English dialect -- can only go so far in terms
> of providing clarity.

Yes, as said i suggested this as a component that may help improving 
attractiveness and inclusiveness for potential contributors of tagging 
documentation, not as the solution to all problems.

The wiki style collaborate editing of text is something that works well 
if there is consensus among contributors about the goals of the 
endeavour and agreement about the communication style to be used to 
accomplish that.  Given the highly diverse nature of the OSM community 
having this as the only framework in which tagging documentation can be 
produced excludes a tremendeous number of competent potential 
contributors more or less from the start.

To overcome this and make use of the huge reservoir of knowledge (of 
both mappers and data users) that is currently not motivated to 
contribute to tagging documentation on the wiki as it is organized 
right now you need to provide a suitable platform where these can and 
feel motivated to contribute what they know.  Once this exists and is 
actively used then you can think about aggregating and condensing this 
(likely fairly non-uniform and chaotic) information into more uniform 
and more comprehensive texts using wiki style collaborate editing.

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



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