[OSM-talk] Path rendering in the cycleway

[Robin Paulson]

2008/9/1 Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org>:
> ... which can be fixed at a later time, if desired. Trying to create rules

why fix it later, that creates extra work? and what do you mean
'fixed'? i thought having them mapped with one of 3 different tagging
schemes was a good thing?

> upfront runs a high risk of being impractical. And frankly, if our mappers'

in what sense is it impractical? please be more specific

> creativity leads to two or three different ways of tagging the same thing
> (but at least it gets mapped well), what's the big deal? The alternative is

by definition (well, mine anyway), 'mapping well' and 'two or three
different ways of tagging' are not congruent, so to blithely say the
two can happen together, without explaining how, is missing a rather
large and important point. and how many different ways exactly? two or
three sounds vague. what happens when someone wants to use the data to
do something useful? if there are two or three (or four, or five, or
six....) ways of modelling the same thing, at what point do they stop
looking up data structures, to find out how to extract data on, say
rivers, because someone's been 'creative' and made up a new way of
tagging something?

> trying to force them to agree on one way of doing it, which (worst case) can

no-one's forcing anybody. lots of people use map_features for a
reason. they clearly don't want to spend time coming up with new tags,
cos it's boring and tedious - they want to map, cos it's fun and
interesting and involves being outside. if people wanted to come up
with new (duplicate) tags, they would be. thankfully, there are very
few duplicate tags

i used to spend a lot of time on the wiki, working on tag proposals.
occasionally, i would spot what i thought was a duplicate tag. i would
put a note, and get one of two responses: "this isn't a duplicate,
it's similar, but different enough" (e.g. cemetery vs. graveyard), or
"thanks, i hadn't realised that, i'll remove it" never once did anyone
say "i'll carry on thanks, i'm being creative and want to develop a
new way of tagging this"

> make 49% of them unhappy and/or unwilling to map the item in question.

hold on, what do you mean unhappy? says who? 49% might well be the
worst case, but what's the actual case? it could be 10%. or 0.1%

have you been reading max weber? this sounds a lot like a weberian
critique of rationalisation, which is a bit extreme

> If I can get 100 people to map something by allowing three different ways of
> doing it, then this is much better than getting only 51 people mapping it
> the "one true way".

to suggest one is diametrically opposed to the other is pure
guesswork. how did you arrive at these figures?