[OSM-talk] Proliferation of path vs. footway

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

Tom Chance wrote:
> 1 – Nobody can actually agree what highway=path means so it is being used
> in different senses all over the world, which reduces its usefulness to
> near zero

Perhaps it really *is* useless and it was good that our process 
demonstrated that?

> We currently have no process for dealing with these problems, nor with (for
> example) the evident shortcomings of natural world / countryside tagging,
> as the hopeless disagreements around forest/wood illustrate. The OSM
> community can either pretend that we live in a world of perfect information
> and emergent consensus

In my eyes, it is not required that the same tagging rules are used all 
over the world. It may be a pet peeve of mine but I think that the 
majority of people take this as given without ever spending a second 
thinking about whether this might not create more problems than it 
solves. We solve loads of very complex problems all the time - are we 
really sure that we are unable to cope with a database in which, say, 
Canada uses a slightly different tagging scheme than does Scandinavia? 
Do we really have to steamroll everyone in the whole world into 
submission to some sort of consensus with people on the other side of 
the planet?

> or we can grow up and take a leaf out of every
> other successful open source project and set-up some processes where
> consensus is more difficult to reach.

I think that "consensus" is totally overrated. "Rough consensus" makes 
sense, but we have that, and everything else will work itself out 
eventually. All this talk about OSM being useless if consensus doesn't 
exist for the smallest detail is just scaremongering by people who 
cannot cope with complexity or diversity.

Bye
Frederik