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

[Dave Stubbs]

On Thu, Mar 20, 2008 at 4:27 PM, Alex Mauer <hawke at hawkesnest.net> wrote:
> Sven Grüner wrote:
>
>  > I agree with you that some terms in this process might not be optimal,
>  > same applies to depricated. But as a non-native speaker I never thought
>  > about that and just took these words for what they mean in this context.
>  >
>  > On the other hand I still see that the word approve fits in here quiet
>  > well. The question is what, how and why someone approves something. In
>  > our context I (when voting) approve by the authority of my own opinion
>  > that the tagging in question is making sense. That's all to it.
>  >
>  > I consider it obvious that I'm casting my vote NOT on behalf of OSMF or
>  > some other superhuman instance somewhere out there but just on the
>  > authority any human has from it's birth on, his own opinion.
>  > I also consider it obvious that nobody has any authourity or even power
>  > about which tags a mapper may enter, regardless of what he writes in our
>  > wiki or elsewhere.
>  >
>  > And after a quick glance at http://dict.leo.org/?search=approve I don't
>  > even think 'approve' is such a strong word at all. But when you're more
>  > comfortable with 'agree' we should consider that.
>
>  I am a native speaker, and this entire post reflects my opinion as well.
>
>  I am particularly confused about the strong negative reaction to
>  "deprecated".  A lot of people seem to take it as "forbidden to use
>  ever" or something like that, which seems weird to me.
>

I think the problem is the use of the language in regard to the
feature itself. A single person approving of a tag is obviously fine,
but once a vote happens, and about 10 people approve of it, the tag
then becomes an Approved Tag... or at least some people think it
does.. this obfuscates the rather limited source of approval.
Deprecation has a similar but more annoying problem... a bunch of
people on the wiki decide they don't use a tag or have a better way,
so essentially disapprove of it. It then gets marked as "deprecated"
to the complete confusion of the active mappers who are happily using
it and actually approve of it but weren't around for the vote.

I don't really think it's the language that's the main problem so much
as the opaqueness and finality presumed in the end result.