[Tagging] Rules

[Dian Ågesson]

I loathe to continue a conversation that is unlikely to be productive, 
especially as a relative newcomer to OSM. Nevertheless...

Debating "any tag you like" is essentially debating descriptivism vs 
prescriptivism: does the definition of the tag inform the usage or vice 
versa; is a tag valid if the proper "procedure" has not been followed; 
and so on. Prescriptive standards would be my choice if I was running my 
own mapping company. An employee could raise concerns, ideas, or 
suggestions of course, but their manager (or the boss) ultimately makes 
the call on what's right and what's wrong. This (generally) works 
because employees are required to follow the rules to earn their 
paycheque, and if they don't conform they will be replaced with someone 
who does.

This is not a dynamic that suits volunteerism. Volunteers give their 
time for a multitude of reasons and are incentivised by fundamentally 
different things than an employee is. Management of volunteer teams and 
upholding standards in volunteer organisations is not easy, but is 
achievable: volunteers need to _want_ to follow the rules, and generally 
need to agree with them as well. Otherwise, they will just leave.

Changing something as fundamental as the core principles of a project 
cannot be achieved without alienating a lot of volunteers, even if the 
change could lead to an improvement. Again, this isn't OSM specific; 
it's volunteer/online communities in general. If I was designing a data 
structure for a greenfield project, there are many things I (and nearly 
everyone else!) would want to change in some way. But OpenStreetMap 
isn't a greenfield project, and change can't be effected through brute 
force or just "creating a better standard". (See: https://xkcd.com/927/ 
)

I'd also suggest that creating a more prescriptive tagging system would 
make contributing much less appealing to newcomers. People will come and 
go in any volunteer organisation, regardless of cause, nature, size. 
Some volunteers will contribute for a short but intense period of time, 
others will make sustained contributions over many years. To keep a 
volunteer operation sustainable, there will generally need to be a 
continued intake of new volunteers to fill the gap from those who have 
left. If I had needed to read the entire OSMWiki before my first edit, I 
wouldn't have contributed at all. Taking away the freedom to tag as you 
like would also legitimise a sort of "death by policy". I don't want to 
see OSM become a beauracracy at the expense of diversity of contributors 
(cf. Wikipedia and it's overwhelming amount of guidelines).

I don't doubt the intentions of any contributor to OSM, but communities 
rarely survive a drastic change of governance.

Dian

On 2022-02-03 14:15, s8evq wrote:

> On Thu, 3 Feb 2022 13:09:40 +0000, Andy Townsend <ajt1047 at gmail.com> 
> wrote:
> 
>> 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.
> 
> I'm sorry, but that's not a valid argument. There might have been other 
> factors that caused OSM to be more successful than other projects, 
> "despite" the hand-off approach. You just can't make that assertion so 
> easily.
> 
>> So far you've tried this (at least) on Telegram and
>> tried this here, but have received significant pushback in both 
>> places.
> 
> On the topic of pushback, I would like to comment this: here on the 
> tagging list, there are some old-timers that want to keep OSM the way 
> it's been going forever, as it's the "correct" way. Opposition gets 
> quickly shouted down by the louth-mouths. If only people would take a 
> few seconds, and wonder: "What if the other person is actually right?"
> 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.
> 
> 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. I have the feeling these old-timers don't 
> even think it's anywhere remotely possible that these new contributors 
> might possibly have a point.
> 
> 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".
> 
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