[OSM-talk] Edit war on the wiki "map features"

[Matthias Julius]

Ralf Zimmermann <osm_list at ralfzimmermann.de> writes:

> The voting process and its imperfectness has been discussed a lot. And this is a 
> different topic really. But I still see the "voting" process being useful. It is 
> a very good way of quickly getting opinions that could leave to one of two 
> decisions:
> a) The proposed new tag somewhat fits into the world of existing tags.
> b) There is no better idea out there on how to better tag this new feature.
> And even though the new tag might not be the perfect solution - if nobody comes 
> up with a better idea during the voting process - this is a good start for 
> calling the tag "approved" and recommend it for everybody elses use.

The biggest criticism of the voting has been that only very few people
participate in it and how are those 15 people to tell thousands of
mappers how to tag.  And of course the counter argument is that if
you care you should vote.  But, whatever the reason for people to not
participate, the voting process is not very representative of the
mappers.  I guess many people only start to care about a particular
tag when they need to.

So I think it is a good idea to collect features that have been
approved by the voting process outside of Map Features.  If actual
usage then shows that a feature has been accepted by a wider group of
people it can be added to Map Features.  If a newly approved feature
is meant to replace one that is on Map Features I would only add a
note to Map Features linking to that alternative.

Matthias