[OSM-talk] barrier=gate

[Karl Newman]

On Sun, Nov 9, 2008 at 10:33 AM, Nic Roets <nroets at gmail.com> wrote:

>
>
> 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
>>
>
>
This is a strong argument for careful consideration before putting something
into widespread use. Of course, this risks "death by discussion" but at
least some opportunity for discussion should be given. In any case,
definitely don't tell people "Oh, we can always change it later" when in
fact we can't.

Karl
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk/attachments/20081109/d23e75ab/attachment.html>