[Tagging] Proposal process [was: healthcare]

[mail at marcos-martinez.net]

Hi Martin,

you are comparing the wrong things.

What I tried to say: Generally speaking we should strive for improving 
things. As we are talking about a database, standardization can be part 
of the solution and should be something considered desirable. It 
shouldn't be a valid argument against it to say "we can also use a 
workaround, you see? It's only requires a little more effort and still 
provides the same result." Give me one reason for not doing it right 
from the start.

I didn't compare OSM with sand and didn't advocate at all to move it 
with a caterpillar. But let me take it further:

The sandcastle is actually a pretty good example for how OSM works. At 
the beginning people started to put the big chunks at the bottom, they 
were few and pretty soon were able to agree on building some kind of 
solid foundation (highways and buildings are generally speaking a de 
facto standardization right now) but with time more and more people got 
involved and started doing their own things and it has become 
increasingly difficult to agree on how to build them, making it more 
unstable (nowadays the only thing we know for sure when tagging 
something as " forest" or "wood" is that you will probably find some 
trees there. Additional value doesn't exist). More and more details and 
decoration is being built on top of it and the castle is more and more 
shaking. To fix things you now must use a tiny spoon to prevent the 
whole construction from coming down. Something that will happen on it 
sown the higher you build it without a proper structure below.

Can we change it without destroying the whole castle? Sure, it is up to 
us. We should be able to decide what should be the means, the time and 
extend of what we want to amend, modify and improve according to its 
importance within the castle and its benefits. We should be able to 
decide that at least from now on we want any addition to be more 
structured and agreed on, if necessary with documented, local variations 
and exceptions, so that other people can build more safely on top. As I 
say, it is up to us and this community is full of competent and 
dedicated people, capable of finding the right balance.

But only if we wanted to, because right now this doesn't exist and the 
castle keeps growing in size and instability.

Cheers

Am 06.11.2022 13:00, schrieb Martin Koppenhoefer:

> sent from a phone
> 
>> On 6 Nov 2022, at 12:34, mail at marcos-martinez.net wrote:
>> 
>> Regarding standardization: First of all, I hope we all work on the 
>> basis that we want to improve things. Can you move a ton of sand with 
>> a spoon?
> 
> thing is, we don't have just a heap of sand, we have hundreds of 
> thousands of people having contributed by adding small parts of a 
> gigantic castle like structure made of sand, and these people expect 
> following mappers to use spoons so that the initial work isn't 
> inadvertently destroyed, as would be the case when moving the castle 
> with a caterpillar.
> 
> They also object to people who propose changing the sand underneath the 
> visible structure with sand of a different color, because they fear it 
> could make the whole structure collapse and because it won't be visible 
> anyway. ;-)
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