[Talk-us] Key:man_made... Outdated language?

Frederik Ramm frederik at remote.org
Fri Mar 10 22:08:07 UTC 2017


Hi,

On 03/10/2017 10:27 PM, Joshua Houston wrote:
> It occurred to me that "man_made" is an outdated term

Two observations:

1. Our tagging system is complicated, illogical, and has little to do
with real language. Things are tagged as amenity even if they're hardly
that in any normal use of the word ("amenity=prison"). Most amenities
are human-made, so why not man_made=prison? And why is it landuse=basin
even though that's also human-made, etc? So if you start taking this
apart on the basis that man-made things can also be made by women or
people who don't associate with either gender, then there's a whole lot
more you might want to pull straight.

2. For the reasons given in 1., we're exposing users less and less to
the actual tags - witness editors and the web site's own "identify
feature" function which will use presets and translated terms to present
things to the user in proper words and in their language. I think that
here lies the future of inclusivity; changing from man_made to
human_made is something that only very few users in OSM would even
notice, and even then you'd still exclude all those who don't speak
English. But working on presets and tag translations and maybe even
styling tools that abstract from tags will help to include not only
English-speaking technically-interested women, but also everyone who
doesn't speak English and everyone who doesn't deal with databases as a
hobby.

Bye
Frederik

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



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