[OSM-talk] Proliferation of path vs. footway

[Tom Chance]

Frederik,

On Tue, 11 Aug 2009 11:18:35 +0200, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> 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?

Hmm, the process has demonstrated that a useless tag is now widely being
used. The process - so-called - hasn't coped with something as complex as
saying "let's have a bit of a rethink about this group of existing tags and
some missing features". The process has left us with conflicting wiki pages
in different languages, and 100s of emails with anecdotes of contradictory
usage. The vast majority of OSM users won't have read this email thread,
and may be following the wiki pages, or something their mate told them, or
example tagging from a nearby area, further mixing up a useless tag.

Is that good?


>> 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. 

I agree, so that's a silly straw man argument. One caveat, though: for most
things, we can find standard international tags which also mean you can
produce a useful consistent map for all of those countries. Otherwise the
data becomes useless, or unecessarily complex, at an international scale,
and y'know some people might want to use it at that scale.


> 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.

You can exaggerate mine and others' arguments if you want. You can say
we're scaremongering, that we don't like diversity and that we have small
brains and yellow trousers, if that makes you happy.

But the fact remains that we *do not* have - even in the most generous
sense - rough consensus around the tagging of paths, nor various natural
world features.

Regards,
Tom