[OSM-talk] iD influencing tagging

Simon Poole simon at poole.ch
Mon Apr 8 08:29:50 UTC 2019


Am 07.04.2019 um 18:12 schrieb Clifford Snow:
>  The original post on talk-de really seemed to be complaining that the
> development staff is paid. Maybe what we should be asking is "Should
> OSMF fund development of tools?" 

I think that isn't really a correct interpretation of the original
concern raised.

It was more (paraphrasing so I apologize if I'm mangling things too
much): the default editor on osm.org is in a privileged position and
gives who ever is in control of it has substantial power over the
project, this has always been the case and isn't something new (as
Richard has pointed out). The concern raised was that there are no real
checks and balances (not even the need to finance a living by a day job
as Richard had to do) wrt that power.

Tagging decision are what the following discussion jumped on, but I
don't really think that is so critical, there was a phase when there was
a couple of weird decisions, but in general these have always (just as
with JOSM) tended to affect low use tags. In the grand scheme of things
not really a big deal.

I would be more concerned about things being added to iD's functionality
that look like "good ideas" but haven't gone through a proper critical
(non-technical) review as in "do we actually want this feature and what
are the consequences of adding it". Two particularly problematic
"recent" additions: recording the last position in the walk through and
recording the number of warnings that have been ignored in changesets.
It doesn't really matter if this was a requests by the unknown entities
holding the purse strings, or if Bryan and Quincy simply thought them up
over a beer or similar, they still should have been discussed in a wider
(aka not just the OSM-US bubble) audience before the first line of code
was written.

Simon



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