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

[Mateusz Konieczny]

On Thu, 28 Jan 2016 19:50:11 +0000
Andy Townsend <ajt1047 at gmail.com> wrote:

> 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? :-)

In most cases - this tag will not be rendered/processed/accepted by
data consumers and hopefully mapper will notice that something is wrong
and investigate.

In many cases it will happen in editor itself - for example
natural=tree in JOSM will result in a nice icon, natural=treee will not,

At least some editors (like JOSM) have validator that will complain.

> 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.

OSM database will always have some minor amount of complete junk
([surface=paved;unpaved] or [surface=paved; paved; unpaved; unpaved] or
[surface=paved; unpaved; unpaved; unpaved; unpaved; unpaved; unpaved;
unpaved; paved; unpaved; paved; unpaved; unpaved; unpaved; paved;
paved; paved] - see
http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org//search?q=surface%3Dpaved%3Bunpaved ).

That is not a major problem, and this thread is about another
topic - whatever results of discussion/voting on wiki should have impact
on editing software, map styles and editors (the same arguments may be
applied to discussion on tagging mailing list).