[Tagging] Rules (was: Feature proposal - Approved - deprecate embassy=embassy)

[Andy Townsend]

On 03/02/2022 11:22, mail at marcos-martinez.net wrote:
>
> Where does it say people can't vote for a deprecation and that their 
> vote is useless and without consequence? There have been 33 people who 
> are in favor. I see you and Simon are opposing. Are you both the 
> representatives of the community above others? If not and you are 
> referring to some noble and basic OSM rule that needs to be followed, 
> I kindly request you to direct me to a place where the rule is stated 
> and who approved it/on which consensus it was elaborated?
>
Firstly, it's perhaps worth mentioning that its silly having an argument 
over amenity=embassy because there's only one of those left 
https://overpass-turbo.eu/s/1fKw , and that appears to be mistagged.

However, the general point is important, and it's important to separate 
OSMF from OSM here.  OSMF's mission statement is here:

https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Mission_Statement

It has as its first sentence "The OpenStreetMap Foundation is an 
international, not-for-profit, democratic organisation with the tasks of 
*supporting the OSM project*, running and protecting the OSM database, 
and making it available to all. " (my emphasis).

The OSMF is an organisation that you can join and has a democratically 
elected board that you can stand for.  It has a number of appointed 
working groups who report to the board.  If you believe that the OSMF's 
approach should be more "hands on" than the current "supporting" role 
then please stand for the board and make that case.

There are a bunch of other policies - 
https://wiki.osmfoundation.org/wiki/Policies_and_other_Documents - but 
you'll notice that there's no "tagging policy" among those.

How people map things and which tags they use is handled by a general 
community consensus and a bit of common sense on all sides.  Over the 
years an aversion to deprecation has grown up due to the surprises that 
it can cause for people who work with OSM data - not just editor 
developers, but data consumers of all stripes.  There are times where 
deprecation makes sense (e.g. "highway=ford" on ways doesn't let you say 
what sort of highway it is, beyond being a ford) but many times when it 
does not.  If a new form of tagging makes sense mappers (guided by the 
editors that they use) will adopt it and as it appears in the OSM 
database, data consumers will support it.

You say that 33 people voted in favour of this "deprecation" (and there 
are around 660 people who will see this message directly via this 
mailing list), but those are tiny "even less than a rounding error" 
numbers compared to 
https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Stats#Contributor_statistics_reports .

It's important that we discuss how we tag things as a project, and the 
tagging mailing list and the wiki both form part of that. What we don't 
currently have (at API, board or working group level) is a way of 
enforcing the views of 33 people over the 300k (active contributors last 
year).  What you appear to be wanting is a way of not only telling lots 
of other people that they're "doing it wrong" but actively enforcing 
your views over them. Historically OSMF members have tended to vote for 
board members who were in favour of a "supporting" role rather than a 
"telling people how to map" one - if you read through the candidate 
manifestos from last and previous years you'll see a number of people 
suggesting a more "hands on" role for the foundation, but OSMF members 
have tended not to vote for them.

It's perhaps also worth remembering that OSM, with its hands-off "any 
tags you like" approach has succeeded where other initiatives from 
around the same time (e.g. Wikimapia) have been less successful.  
Elsewhere, Wikipedia succeeded where Nupedia failed; in the world of 
computing the "Expert Systems" approach (all the rage when I started 
working on systems doing what would now be called "Machine Learning" at 
the back end of the 1980s) has similarly been eclipsed.  If you want to 
change one of the core principles of OSM (consensus rather top-down 
imposed tagging) you're going to need to make some really good arguments 
to persuade people.  So far you've tried this (at least) on Telegram and 
tried this here, but have received significant pushback in both places.

It's been said before, but bears repeating, that OpenStreetMap is _not_ 
a computer science project.  Someone emerging from college will surely 
look at the OSM tagging that has evolved over the years and suggest how 
it ought to have been designed back in the 2000s.  However, unless they 
have access to a time machine they don't have to opportunity to go back 
and make that change.  Any changes now need to consider the "installed 
base" of data, mappers, data consumers etc.  Many or most of these 
people are volunteers. As a data consumer, exactly why should I spend my 
own free time playing catch up with the latest wiki vote until a new way 
of tagging is broadly supported by OSM mappers?

Best Regards,

Andy (a member of the Data Working Group, but written in a personal 
capacity)

PS: I've resisted replying until now, as I suspect that many other 
people have, because unfortunately 
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brandolini's_law applies - it's possible 
for people to make the same arguments against the status quo again and 
again in slightly different ways without actually addressing reasons 
advanced why something might be a bad idea.  To answer _every one_ of 
these would be a waste of time that could be better spent doing 
something useful, like mapping.  Some people, unfortunately, seem to be 
"only here for the argument".  As the saying goes "Never wrestle with a 
pig. you both get dirty and the pig likes it".



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