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

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 2/3/22 15:15, s8evq wrote:
> You write that only a fraction of the OSM contributors are active on this mailing list. How is that, you think? There's no open atmosphere here.

I don't think that any mailing list could ever handle *more* than a 
fraction of OSM contributors. People would join for a day, receive 100 
messages, and quit again because they can't handle that much.

And that's not even opening the language can of worms.

Regarding the "open atmosphere", personally, what I always resist is 
when people try to reduce openness, for example by trying to dictate to 
others which tags are "right" and "wrong".

> These old-timers fail to see that a big group of contributors come to OSM with good intentions, and make it a better project, with better, cleaner data structure. They fail to even consider the thoughts and ideas of this large group.

The problem is that all these people with good intentions can think of 
is making OSM more controlled. More rules, stricter enforcement of stuff 
so we can all enjoy the better, cleaner data structure. Oh, you only 
speak Portuguese or Bangla, sorry, you can'T be part of this big group 
of cool people who invent the nice and clean OSM because they're all on 
the tagging list debating in English.

> Just consider that a rather large group of contributors thinks a clean data structure is important (more than tag-anything-you-like), and you'll have to do more than just keep repeating "You're wrong".

There are ways to work on cleaning up the OSM data structure but 
discussing which tags should be preferred over which other tags ranks 
very far down in that list. It would be much more important to work on a 
better way of representing area/polygon objects, and probably on better 
ways to communicate changes (for example, a way to upload just a single 
tag change for an object rather than a full new object, and a way to 
record edit operations so a history viewer could tell you "this way has 
been split" rather than "ah, this way has been shortened by 6 nodes and 
another way has been created that seems to have just these same nodes". 
Things like that. But, as Andy said in another post, any non-trivial 
change in OSM has (a) a political component - selling your change to 
those who have to develop the software to support it - and (b) a 
management component - managing the implementation of the change, 
communicating, testing, and so on.

It is naive to believe you can have 30 people vote on a change and 
whoops, there it is.

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"