[OSM-talk] Worldwide non-surveyed tag edits

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

2014-06-11 10:00 GMT+02:00 Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org>:

> Yes, in fact we used to explicitly recommend that people use their user
> name, a colon, and their own key name to distinguish special private
> tags from public ones. I am not sure if these recommendations still
> exist on the Wiki but it used to be common practice.
>


While I completely agree that these edits referred to by the OP are
mechanical edits and should have been discussed beforehand and maybe in
some cases not executed at all (i.e. I'd expect DWG to revert them), I
think that "private" tags should not have a home in OSM.

We are building a community map and IMHO the aim should be to get to some
commonly agreed on tags. Having a username prefixed to a tag will lead to a
lot of similar tags for the same thing and will slow down if not interrupt
finding a consensus of how to tag. This does not mean that you shouldn't
invent tags in case there either isn't yet a tag for the thing you are
mapping or you don't feel that the definition or semantics of the well
introduced tags fit for what you want to express. In both cases though your
new tag should be documented so that other people can also use it (and can
understand what you wanted to tag) and it should possibly get a meaningful
name for its key and value. A username is not meaningful with respect to
what a tag does express, and I don't see a point in adding it. Let's
incourage people to invent generally usable tags and not a plethora of
private tags with similar or duplicate / overlapping meaning.

cheers,
Martin
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