[OSM-talk] highway=* + area=yes vs area:highway=*

Christoph Hormann osm at imagico.de
Sat Aug 11 08:06:21 UTC 2018


On Saturday 11 August 2018, Martin Koppenhoefer wrote:
> >
> > The wiki has definitely had problems recently and we should have a
> > good discussion about what we want from it.
>
> I don’t know since when you are following the wiki development, but
> from my point of view, there is nothing that would be worse
> “recently” that couldn’t have happened 10 years ago. On the contrary,
> I think it is now more stable and there are more eyes on it than
> before. It seems, questionable edits are often discovered and
> reverted within some hours or few days, while it took months and
> years when there were only few users.

This is part of the problem.  There is a certain trend towards a 
wikipediarization of our wiki in the sense that there are many active 
editors who essentially try to maintain the status quo in tag 
documentation, even if it does not represent how a tag is used or who 
try to document a subjective view what a tag should mean instead of 
documenting how it is actually used.

In other words:  If tag documentation pages on the wiki are out of touch 
with the reality of tag use this is often not the result of 
undiscovered questionable edits but because active wiki editors want 
them to be this way or don't care they are this way.  We don't really 
have a mechanism that forces or even incentivizes editors to ensure 
documentation is accurate.

This is not a new phenomenon - like in wikipedia this is a fairly 
natural result of the transit from expansion (where edits were 
predominantly writing new documentation) to maintainance (with 
predominantly changes of existing documentation).

-- 
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/



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