[OSM-talk] An open letter to OSMF board members.

[Simon Poole]

Am 01.06.2022 um 08:28 schrieb Ilya Zverev:
> I think that is called gaslighting.
And your posting is called white knighting if you are intent on throwing 
around such lingo.
>
> What is OSM but a series of pet features, adopted by the community because these are described on the wiki or rendered on the main map style?

It is a consequence of the technology that there are limits to what can 
be displayed in a reasonable fashion with raster tiles as the decision 
cannot be deferred to the end user. Decisions what to render are always 
going to be somewhat arbitrary as there are always a multitude of 
features that are equally or more important, and that is a good thing. 
Experience shows that detailed rules just leads to the system being gamed.

> The discussion currently refers to a tag that's been used >10k times, has an approved proposal, and starts to be used in many countries — near me as well.
>
> And it's not the first time: I believe there are quite a few people, including myself, that had a similar experience with the maintainers and other "pet features".
A couple of years back amenity=car_sharing was removed from the carto 
rendering, for the Swiss community this was a key, useful feature, that 
illustrated how much better OSM data could be than even that from the 
operators of such services. While we were slightly surprised that it was 
removed, and there was some follow up discussion, in the end it was one 
of the reasons we started supporting our own carto fork  
(https://osm.ch/#10/47.0004/8.5007). Though even back then it was more 
of a marketing thing than anything else, because in real life a consumer 
is going to use a mobile app, or a dedicated thematic map to find such 
things and there is no real need to use a general purpose map style to 
locate such facilities.
>
> What separates these pet features from important universally accepted features (that's sarcasm) is whether they apply to Western Europe, where most of the maintainers live. Maybe we should strive for a more universal map style.

That is obviously nonsense, see the example above.

Simon

>
> Ilya
>
> On Wed, 1 Jun 2022, at 02:24, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>> Hi,
>>
>> I think I've said that in one of those endless diary discussions -
>> almost everyone who complains about something in openstreetmap-carto is
>> just unhappy that they don't get their pet feature rendered.
>>
>> In order to provide acceptable cartography, massive gatekeeping is
>> required on the part of openstreetmap-carto maintainers. For every new
>> feature they accept, they should really throw old two old features,
>> otherwise the map becomes everything else but a map.
>>
>> (We had a map style once where everyone could add their own features in
>> SVN, with nobody doing any gatekeeping. Guess how that turned out.)
>>
>> I'm happy to listen to anyone who has any critique of
>> openstreetmap-carto but NOT TO PEOPLE WHO ARE UNHAPPY BECAUSE THEIR
>> FEATURE DID NOT GET RENDERED.
>>
>> If you are one of those people who are unhappy because their feature did
>> not get rendered, I will assume that any other criticism you have to
>> offer (other than that your feature did not get rendered) is just trying
>> to get revenge.
>>
>> If you're trying to abuse the code-of-conduct system to bully people in
>> the hope of ultimately getting your pet feature rendered, then shame on
>> you - this is not what a code of conduct is for.
>>
>> As for replacing the maintainers - if I understand you correctly you're
>> asking the board to pay people to do the maintenance. I would agree to
>> that if that maintenance is guided by the principle I mentioned above -
>> for every additional feature they accept, throw out two old features.
>>
>> Because if what you're asking is for the board to pay money in order to
>> have more mellow maintainers who will happily accept a 348th crappy icon
>> just so that some niche interest group can have their feature "on the
>> main map" then that would be making OSM worse not better.
>>
>> Bye
>> Frederik
>>
>> -- 
>> Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"
>>
>> _______________________________________________
>> talk mailing list
>> talk at openstreetmap.org
>> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
> _______________________________________________
> talk mailing list
> talk at openstreetmap.org
> https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
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