[OSM-talk] Role of the Wiki

[Roland Olbricht]

Hi,

> what if I tag it wrong?

There is no right or wrong tagging. When you tag, you tell all data users a message. And either they understand you or they don't. There are things that are easy to tell like street names, because this is completely formal. There are things that are not formal at all and difficult to tell (e.g. street importance, although displayed prominently on the map). And things that could be formal but being formalized different in different regions because they are factual different in different regions (e.g. speed limit systematics, seasonal infrastructure, may bicycles run against a one-way direction?, various facets of public transport).

That's the point where the wiki could show it's value: make a systematic tagging for your region and then explain the subtle details of this tagging in a dedicated wiki page such that a foreigner can make sense of the tagging.

> What if a new  way of tagging something gets approved? The moment it
> becomes "approved" there will be probably 0 objects with the new tags,
> and if someone follows this principle (from what I see, this is exactly
> what happens) the new tags won't be used, rendering useless the
> discussion and approving of the new tags*.

That's exactly the problem. The "proposal" concept errorneously conveys the idea that tagging-schemes are somehow designed and standardized and then afterwards applied to real world. This fails notoriously inside and outside OSM because reality quite often tends to not fit into any formal scheme.

The best practice is to first observe the facts in the real. Then tell it other mappers and data consumers. This includes tagging it to enable other mappers to understand the local situation as well as afterwards documenting it on the wiki.

This may or may not end up with the discovery that a similar problem has already appeared elsewhere. That is the helpful process of the discussion.

If the a retagging is necessary at all, then the discussion process will turn out which old tag shall be mapped on which new tag. The actual mapping is then done very easily by software.

So the important message is: The wiki comes into play only after observing reality and tagging it in some way, even if that tagging is not the final way. Hence a proposal having 0 known examples is not a transitional state, but very likely useless.

Cheers,

Roland