[Tagging] I am reverting an edit to the "Names" page on the Wiki -- where to discuss that topic

[Georg]

Dear all,

with Mateusz we obviously have a person strongly speaking up for this
mailing list 🙂

Wed 2022-08-24 15:55 Mateusz Konieczny  wrote

>         The wiki talk page of the "Names" page is not the place where
>         the OSM
>         community decides how to use names though, that's why I believe
>         that a
>         discussion - at least - here is warranted.
>
>
>     here – the tagging mailing list - is also not where OSM community
>     decides, but just one more discussion place that is as much/little
>     authoritative like the wiki talk pages 🙂
>
> Given significantly wider and varied participation here and being
> more accessible while still not being a proprietary platform,
> mailing lists actually are much more authoritative that wiki talk pages.
 > ...
> <https://community.openstreetmap.org/> has decent chance to become
> more prominent, but for now tagging mailing list has the broadest base.

You simply write "given" and "has the broadest base" as if it was a
clear fact, but the tagging mailing list had for example only ~35 active
participants last month [1], so not even an amount high enough to
represent each country with more than 40 million inhabitants [4] or each
language with more than 50 million speakers [5]. Seeing this, I have
massive difficulties to consider a "significant wide and varied
participation" or "broad base" of the OSM community in talk ML. Also the
~650 active wiki editors in last 30 days [2] is – despite being ~20
times bigger – still a tiny minority considering we have ~46000 OSM
active editors a month [3]. In that shade, talk ML as well as wiki edits
are both crumbs of a really big cake, and we both hope the revamped
forum will become a considerable chunk – so, will have a much higher
participation rate 🙂🤞

[1] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/2022-July/author.html
[2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Special:ActiveUsers
[3] http://osmstats.neis-one.org/?item=members
[4]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_and_dependencies_by_population
[5]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_languages_by_total_number_of_speakers

> There are some Slack/Discord/Telegram channels but all of them having
> barriers to use (but often having much better interface)

Please do not forget also the ML has considerable barriers to use, for
example:
* It is visible on nearly no OSM web page and tool (I stumbled across it
after over 10 years discussing in many other channels)
* It makes your e-mail address public, which many users are hesitant to
do because of junk mail crawlers
* Mailman does not accept the password it sends to me, probably because
it contains an umlaut (clarification in progress) – not really
accessible in context of a world wide community.
* The answer to an empty mail to tagging-request at openstreetmap.org with
subject "help" will probably cause troubles even to a considerable share
of digital natives – and my parents would definitely not be able to cope
with it.

As written: Currently, IMHO all communication channels are only
representing tiny minorities and no single one is sufficient for a broad
consensus working fine across regions, cultures and languages.

Regards,
Georg