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

[Gervase Markham]

Dave Stubbs wrote:
 > So when a group of 5-15 people on the wiki all vote for a feature and
 > "approve" it, it generally means absolutely nothing. Tagging lives and
 > dies by it's usefulness, by how much it's used, and by whether anyone
 > actually producing an end product decides to use it. So if there's any
 > authority it isn't in the approval process.

No, I never said it was. The authority is in having a definitive 
Map_Features page, and some mechanism for controlling changes to it.

Of course tagging lives and dies by its usefulness; Map_Features is a 
way of saying "People who have thought hard about the specific problems 
associated with tagging X have discussed it, and decided that this is 
the best way. All the renderers recognise this way. You can do it 
another way if you like, but you'll run into problems, and it won't get 
rendered right." This is absolutely fine. All I'm saying in addition is 
instead of me just going and editing Map_Features to say "actually, I've 
decided we should tag all distances in metres", there should be a 
discussion process and consensus reached first.

Or would you rather I just did that? And if I did, and there's no 
authority, who's to say I'm wrong?

Gerv