[OSM-talk] Move tagging RfCs/voting to extra list?

[Ulf Lamping]

Frederik Ramm schrieb:
> Hi,
>   
>> Well, if nobody wants to write digests, then IMHO it's just not a good  
>> idea to move to a seperate mailing list.
>>     
> Well in that case I'd say let's just bin the whole voting process and
> live happily ever after ;-)
>   
Hopefully I'm too well behaved to answer this one in the tone it deserves.
>> However, simply "banning" this stuff from talk ASAP just because you and  
>> some others might not be interested in - without thinking how it could  
>> seamlessly work in the future?
>>     
> I think it is not a secret that I am mostly ignoring the voting. My
> rationale behind this is: If people decide stuff that makes sense to
> me, then I'll use it anyway; if they decide stuff that does not make
> sense to me, then I won't, and will tag things differently. I might
> offer an idea now and again, but on the whole I don't feel that I have
> to fight for reason because if something unreasonable gets decided I
> will ignore it and be happy. This is great, because in a stricter
> environment I might have to spend half of my time shooting down
> nonsensical proposals or fighting for those which are good.
>   
Yes, I know that lot's of advanced OSM people work with the "I know how 
to tag my stuff" model that is nowhere else described as in their heads. 
That is all well for you if you ignore the problems that results of this.

One example: In may 2007 when I started OSM there was a "map features" 
page with nothing but a list of tags but almost *no information* what 
these tags might actually stand for - a direct consequence of the "I 
know how to tag my stuff" model. As I've added descriptions to lot's of 
tags on this page, it turned out that there are problems in the way 
people actually use the map features (missunderstandings, 
inconsistencies, ...).

These problems are not solved until today, mostly because of the "I know 
how to tag my stuff" model that is very hard to change once it's settled.

By having a better description of the tags we add today - we hopefully 
might be able to avoid much of these problems in the future.
> I think it is good that people discuss future tagging of things but in
> my eyes the easy things ("what shop=xxx key to use for horticulture
> shops") should just be decided by the first person to encounter them,
> without much fuss,
If you would follow the proposals, you would know that even those "easy 
things" are often not so easy as it first seems. But yes, I remember you 
are ignoring this as you already know better ...
>  and the more complex things like a complete
> proposal for tagging bodies of water can never be done justice in a
> vote. 
Why not and what's the alternative?
> So, personally, I don't see a lot of merit in the voting process
> per se. The voting process as a reason for people to think about stuff
> and to clean up proposals and ideas, yes; but as a decision maker, no.
>   
Please have a look at 
http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php/Proposed_features and see what's 
the result in not doing any such decisions: literally hundreds of 
unfinished proposals that are almost useless as it's very hard to find, 
read and use them.

I mean, what's your alternative to find a decision if some proposal is a 
good thing and should go into the map features or better not? Simply 
add/remove it and wait for some nice edit wars? Wait for a year until 
people come up with enough data in OSM to realize that we have the same 
problems for the new tags as we have with the existing ones?


I know the voting is not perfect and there will be wrong decisions that 
needs to be revisited. But the alternatives I've heard so far are 
causing much more problems and will take much longer to get any (and/or 
probably in the end worse) results IMO.

Regards, ULFL