[OSM-talk] amenity=doctor or amenity=doctors ? & other duplicate tags [tagging]

[Dave Stubbs]

2009/2/24 sly (sylvain letuffe) <liste at letuffe.org>:
>> mess for someone who wants to use our data. Can't hear that argument
>> 'let the application developers decide what they want' any longer!
>
> Looks like an holy war is gone start. Let's try however to keep it low. But
> I'm a part of that war against duplicates tags.
>
> Quoting "Dave" : Handeling duplicates is not complicate, I don't agree.
> Handeling one is easy, handeling hundreds become more and more complicate for
> nothing.

a) that's not a quote, it's a paraphrase.
b) you're taking it out of context.

I'm not advocating hundreds of duplicates, or encouraging duplicates
in any form.

So here is a proper quote:
 "given that there /are/ two tags in use, why go to all the effort to
change it?"

See the difference? I also said a number of times that handling
duplicates was relatively trivial -- it is. It's a pain in the arse,
but a trivial pain the arse.

So sure, duplicates add complication, and it would be better if they
weren't there. That doesn't mean we run a bot.
I don't care about the tags, I care about the bots. They're a blunt
tool that more often than not will fly out of control if people start
using them frequently.


>
> I can't rembember how many (oneway='yes' or oneway='true' or oneway='1') there
> are in the mapnik style's sheets I use.
>
> not talking about tunnel='yes', bridge='yes', and of course the later
> amenity='doctor(s)'
>
> Not that this is a enormous deal for developper, but I think it is one more
> confusing thing about OSM for begginers.
>
> I'm in favor of disussion, describing only one, removing the others from any
> documentation, removing slowly support in renderers and slowly, replace old
> values by new values.

That sounds like a more sensible way of handling it. I'd document both
for a while, specifying a preference, introduce the changes to
validators early and people can change as they find things, and you
can remove the duplicate handling and extra docs when the number as
reduced to a "low" level.

Dave