[OSM-talk] New dimension of vandalism

[Lulu-Ann at gmx.de]

Hi Martin

> I'm happy that you finally put your edits to this list. Actually
> before I was changing the page I was trying to involve as many
> contributors as possible. I not only posted on talk but also on
> talk-de and also on talk-it there was a note about this discussion.

You did not put in in the wiki. Many people are not on the mailing lists because mailing lists consume a lot of time. But they are using the highway tag just as much as the ones that read it. (maybe more, because the are out mapping instead of reading ;-)  )

> Therefore I think that "vandalism" is not really adequat. After some
> time of discussion I was pointing out on the list (referring also to
> the diff) that I changed the page. It was not hidden, but announced
> (many changes in the wiki do neither follow voting nor are announced
> to the lists).

Maybe vandalism was to hard, but we started our controverse with a little edit war... I am also happy this will end now.

You said yourself it was a proposal. It is obvious that this is a tag that is used extremely often, so it should be obvious to use the extablished voting workflow in this case.
There are votings for much minor tags, and it is good that way.
It is easy to put up a proposal, you can copy your new text there and wait two weeks.
 
> Besides this, the German highway-definition already stated the tagging
> according to "importance". 

Everybody, guess who changed it!

http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/index.php?title=DE:Key:highway&diff=prev&oldid=288849

Thank you for making me aware of that.

>Please also note, that "physical state" is
> not absolute but highly relative to the surrounding/context, and that
> it didn't work neither (there was the need for "exceptions").

You can solve the trouble with each sentence in your new proposal.
(I really like the idea of having only the table with pictures, see below...)

> come on, they don't have to be reviewed, because
> a) this is already common practise

Then let's vote on it and see if it is the practice of the majority.

> b) people refer more to the specific definition than to the general one.

Then let's have a proposal that we don't need a general description and the specific definition is the good one (I'd agree I guess!)

> > Two important aspect of routing, the estimation of time to arrival and
> finding the fastest route, will fail if the highway tag does not stick to
> physical facts.
> 
> No, I could say the contrary.

Let's vote on it to see what the majority thinks.

> > Several other established or proposed tags like maxspeed defaults are
> negatively affected by changing the highway concept of tagging.
> 
> No. It seems you didn't look at the changes. AFAIK maxspeed defaults
> are about "in town" and "out-of-town" and (in Germany) about
> dual-carriageways and motorways. They are all not affected.

Let's vote on it to see what the majority thinks.

> > New OSM contributors learn bad practice from the start when the first
> tag they learn is switched from hard facts so unsure estimation.
> 
> Well, it was after an open discussion. What do you mean by "hard
> facts"? I added a reference to physical tags (width, lanes, surface)
> to the page that was missing before. In which way do "physical facts"
> help you to classify a road? Is a unsurfaced road always a track? Is a
> road with 4 lanes always a primary road?

You made a change after a discussion with 8 persons and not all did agree. This is far below the limit for a proposal voting to become approved.
Only in your last email you stated that you want to make a change to the page. If one only missed that one email, he/she was not aware of the change.
That is why votings are on the wiki, text *stays* there.
Also your arguments can be written on a talk page before you edit the main page. You are invited to use it.
 
> please. I didn't change a single specific tag and adjusted the main
> vague definition to common practise, you are not only exagerating, you
> are IMHO completely wrong.

You did change the most important tag. If common practise is not the best way to do something, it should not be in the tutorial - Or at least it shall be marked as an alternative. 
 
> > IMHO this is a new dimension of vandalism. I don't think that this is
> done by concurring commercial map providers, but this subtile method of
> weakening the OSM tagging schema and therefor lowering the quality of OSM data
> would be a really cool attack against OSM, because it is not possible to
> search for and revert such changes systematically.
> 
> Personally I see it contrary.

When I started wiki edits I also thought my edits were the best and no approval was needed... If you have much time, read my changes history, there were also some reverts needed. I was always advised to make a proposal as far as I remember, and not to put it on the list. 
It really seems that we have a devided group of contributors, some on the wiki, some on the list and some in both. 
We need to reach all. The wiki proposal workflow does.

> > I think that we, the community, should not accept such severe changes
> made to extremely used and highly established without the proposal + approval
> workflow.
> > I ask you to support the reverting of the unapproved changes in the wiki
> >and in the mailing lists.
> 
> Did you set up a proposal to do so, that I can vote about?

I did not change anything, I do not need a proposal.
You want to change, you write the proposal. Or anybody of your supporters, if you say that is common usage, I wonder why it has not be done already by anyone.
 
> > I also think we need a consensus that tag descriptions for tags that are
> > used more than 100.000 times shall not be changed without a proposal.

> OK, I agree (and I would set the limit not to 100000 but maybe 2000).
> But I am not sure, if the wiki is a better place than the
> mailing-lists to do so.

I just wrote: "2000 is OK for me, let's have a look at tagwatch what would be included then."
And then I had a look at tagwatch, and I found that only in Germany the top UNdocumented tag is used far over 100.000 times.

addr:housenumber  	344191

I guess we better choose a far higher number for worldwide documented tags.
Let's say the top 50 documented tags shall not be editable without a proposal for the beginning, and take the number from #50 ?

Too much, too little?

(PS: I keep the subject to keep the thread in one. I take back the "vandalism". OK?)

Bye,
Lulu-Ann

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