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

[Dave Stubbs]

On Wed, Mar 19, 2008 at 3:26 PM, Gervase Markham <gerv-gmane at gerv.net> wrote:
> 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?

No, and no.
So the emphasis probably needs a little more tweaking, and perhaps
some human intervention occasionally. Any such system has to pass the
test of being useful, so I'd wait till someone has actually
implemented it and checked how it works in the real word before going
into too much detail about how it won't work because xyz. Any
suggestions about what other metrics might be worth investigating
would be good.

>
>  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.

We can still write documentation and tagging guides. These are very
useful, so they're not going away any time soon.