[OSM-talk] Voting on voting system for proposals

[Paul Norman]

On 3/18/2015 2:43 PM, Clifford Snow wrote:
> Since you are involved with updating the rendering, can you tell us 
> the process to decide what should be rendered? I realize that part of 
> it must be stylistic, but what outside influences cause you to include 
> a tag as part of the standard rendered OSM tile?
I should preface this by stating that these are my opinions, and I know 
other OpenStreetMap Carto maintainers look at it differently. They are 
also not the opinion of my employer, MapQuest, and the MapQuest Open 
style has different cartographic goals.

There are no policies on what is rendered, and types of features are 
decided on a case by case basis.

Normally the process of deciding to render a feature and deciding to 
render a particular tag are separate. You might decide you want to 
render bus stops, but also find that in the region you're rendering 
there is a GTFS feed with better data. In OpenStreetMap Carto, these two 
steps are more entwined. We're aiming at mappers and want to avoid 
additional sources of non-OSM data.

A first consideration is technical. Some of the crazy relation types out 
there are not designed in a way that they can be reasonably rendered 
with a standard toolchain. If I can't figure out how to write the SQL to 
be able to get a data layer suitable for rendering, it almost certainly 
won't be rendered.

I'm only interested in rendering established tags. The primary indicator 
of this is usage. There are some exceptions to this like national 
capitals, where there are only many of them. My view is that a tag 
should be able to obtain reasonable usage numbers on its own merits 
without being rendered. I also look beyond taginfo numbers to see if 
they are being skewed by a small number of contributors, mechanical 
edits, or a bulk import.

We don't want to encourage difficult to consume tagging approach. This 
is why we will not use disused=yes. (#111)

The wiki is a source I use, but just one among many.

A good read is Andy's comment about changing tags: 
https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/230#issuecomment-29238913. 
It is related.

And of course, all of this is done in a limited amount of available 
time. If I decide to work on something with the style it means I'm not 
working on a different part of it. It's zero sum for me, and I always 
have more I can work on. Rendering new types of features is about bottom 
of the priority list for me right now.

> Would you render a tag without a wiki entry, or with just a proposal?
In principle, if it were an established tag? Yes. It's very unlikely an 
established tag would not have a wiki page.
> How does the fact that it may be useful to specific groups, ie, 
> cyclists which has its own style impact your decisions?
I don't particularly consider the presence of specialist styles. There 
are styles for most topical interests these days.