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

[Graeme Fitzpatrick]

On Thu, 3 Feb 2022 at 23:14, Andy Townsend <ajt1047 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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.
>

I mentioned during a similar conversation "last" (?) year, that possibly
the Proposal & Voting system has passed its Use-By?

It may be easier, & much less stressful!, to just come up with a Draft
Concept about "**This**", put a message out asking for comments /
suggestions, make amendments then announce that "**This**" is now a thing &
leave it up to mappers to use or not, depending on whether they think it's
any good?

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).
>
Interesting figures, thanks Andy!

So 0.2% of mappers are on the Tagging list, & I don't think I've ever seen
10% = 66 of them actually vote? (The recent vote on reservoirs had 54 votes
(~8%) & that was a massive response!). Most votes seem to be around the 20
mark so 3% of 0.2% are making "decisions" that "decide / direct" all of OSM
- scary!

I know there are other communication channels: Slack, you mentioned
Telegraph, I've seen mention of Discord & also Discourse (which is
apparently going to become the official channel?) & which was going to be
live "next week" - in October last year ...

Do you have any idea of their usage? Is the Tagging list, despite its lack
of use, still actually the best option for reaching the most people?

Thanks

Graeme
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