[OSM-talk] Applicability of wiki tagging and votes: may, should or must

[Andy Townsend]

On 28/01/2016 19:16, David Marchal wrote:
> Hello, there.
>
> On a GitHub issue 
> (https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/2027#issuecomment-174443685), 
> I've been told that Wiki tagging votes are only advisory and that the 
> community is only invited, neither required nor recommended, to follow 
> them. As I understand this comment, the community MAY follow the Wiki 
> tagging or votes, it does not SHOULD nor MUST follow them. I was under 
> the impression that the community at least SHOULD apply the votes 
> results, MUST looking unenforceable due to the free tagging principle. 
> Am I wrong on that? What is the applicability of the Wiki content?
>

What are you going to do when a new mapper comes along and adds a tag 
that they "SHOULD NOT"?  They won't have read the wiki, because no-one* 
does.  Are you going to send the wiki police around and tell them to 
delete the offending tag with no other sudden movements? :-)

More seriously, any dataset that has no rules enforced at the API level 
must be assumed to have data in it that doesn't meet a specification 
that is written down somewhere, but not enforced. Someone wrote that 
wiki page long ago but didn't actually do anything else, presumably 
expecting the magic code and project management fairies to look after 
all the other changes that they expected to happen.

Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)


* to a reasonable approximation across all mappers in the project, just 
like "no-one" reads mailing lists or forums.
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