[OSM-talk] barrier=gate

[Nic Roets]

On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 8:12 PM, Karl Newman <siliconfiend at gmail.com> wrote:

> This is one of the major problems with the OSM community. Someone proposes
> or just starts using a particular tagging scheme which has some flaws. When
> those flaws are pointed out,


That is by no means unique to OSM. Unix / C had a function called 'creat'
for almost 30 years.

The problem is that OSM has a lot of "momentum" (users remembering tags,
tags being hardcoded into all kinds of software, hundreds of wikipages etc).
So changing tags should not be done lightly.


> the OSM pragmatists just say "Oh, we can always change it later. It's a
> Wiki, after all." But the truth is, you can't change it, because when
> someone does come up with an alternative tagging scheme (like barrier= or
> path= or crossing=) that shows some merit over the original, those same
> pragmatists come back and say "What!? That tag is wrong/invalid/stupid
> because the database already has ten thousand entries of X. And besides,
> you'll break everything!"
>
> Karl
>
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