[OSM-talk] [tagging] Feature Proposal - Voting - boolean values

[James Livingston]

On 03/10/2009, at 5:54 PM, Konrad Skeri wrote:
> Consensus will never happen and we don't have a dictator, which makes
> voting the option left.

I actually agree that we just need to pick one, and since "yes" seems  
to be the most commonly used one, that should be it. However, I just  
don't see how voting is going to help.

> There are a lot more mappers, especially newbees, that care a lot more
> what's on the wiki guidelines than what is being said in a
> 50-messages-a-day-thead on a mailing list only saying "i said" "no you
> said", and frankly isn't leading us anywhere.

I'm not saying that looking things up on the wiki is stupid, only the  
voting. We obviously need a way of documenting tags, and the wiki can  
do a fine job of that.

But how is having the exact same arguments on a wiki discussion page  
(or spread across several) any better than the mailing list?

The problem isn't tied to a particular mechanism, it's a social  
problem where we currently don't have any form if power structure, and  
the one mechanism we have for choosing stuff (voting on the wiki)  
isn't accepted by a whole bunch of people, and doesn't get the buy-in  
it needs. I just don't think winning a wiki-vote 10-to-8 (or similar)  
is enough to convince people that the community actually approves a  
change.


> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_features
> But then again, you could argue that since it's on the wiki it's
> stupid and noone cares about that either.

People have argued before that require a majority of 15 votes is in no  
way enough for changing existing tags that have any significant use.  
Although the majority might be "yes", I would presume that "true" and  
"1" also have significant use, or we wouldn't be having the debate.


> Or are you just opposing any idea that doesn't instantly answer the  
> question of life,
> universe and everything. (Which is 42 by the way)

I'm opposing the wiki-voting process, because I think that it's  
broken, and a sizable chunk of the community don't believe in it.