[OSM-talk] Tag proposal/approval system is too heavyweight

[Gervase Markham]

Andy Robinson (blackadder) wrote:
> 80n and I were just discussing this issue over coffee. We both feel that
> generating tag lists from planet is a good idea, but to give prominence to
> them (ranking if you like) it would be good to have the number of users for
> a particular tag rather than the actual occurrence of the tag in the
> database. 

But that doesn't take into account the relative occurrences of the 
feature. Perhaps only 10 canal-mad people in the UK will ever use the 
"mooring" tag. Does that make the tag less 
useful/important/official/correct/anything than the highway tag which 
thousands of people use? If 25 people mistakenly use "highwey=primary" 
instead of highway, does that make it more correct than using the 
mooring tag?

The database can tell us what _is_, but _is_ does not imply _ought_. We 
can either decide that OSM has no view on _ought_ (and just have a 
free-for-all), or we can take advantage of the accumulated mapping 
expertise of OSM participants and have a set of best-practice "ought"s. 
This is what we do now with Map_Features, some of which were carefully 
designed after considering several other tagging schemes for that 
feature type which seem good at first glance but turn out to have flaws.

Gerv