Message: 6
Date: Thu, 7 Jun 2018 12:32:32 +0200
From: Christoph Hormann <o...@imagico.de>
To: "Tag discussion, strategy and related tools"
<tagging@openstreetmap.org>
Subject: Re: [Tagging] The endless debate about "landcover" as a
top-level tag
On Thursday 07 June 2018, Selfish Seahorse wrote:
There are tons of established tags in OSM where the key makes no
sense at all. Don't get me started on 'waterway' for example. But
that is how OSM works. Get over it, accept that people have made
bad choices of keys when choosing tags and concentrate on
encouraging and helping people to choose suitable keys when newly
creating tags (in a productive way of course, not just by rejecting
any idea as bad).
And what's wrong with getting rid of these bad choices?
Nothing except it would mean the end of free form tagging and it would
require creating some framework of tagging authorities in OSM who
decide on what is good and bad or in short: The end of OSM as an
egalitarian global community.
Once more my suggestion to Martin and others who repeat the same matra
we have heard for years over and over again: Accept that there are
thousands of mappers who do not care about key hygiene like you do or
have the sense of order you have. That is a simple fact of life in a
diverse global community like OSM.
For me this always sounds a bit like someone who wants to 'fix the
English language' by eliminating irregular verbs and other exceptions
so you can say "I goed to the pub yesterday and haved a beer". Yes, in
principle you can do that and you can argue this might make it easier
for people to learn the language but it just would not be English any
more.
Your brave new world with an intelligent design of orthogonal keys
would - apart from being an illusion (Kurt Gödel is greeting) - just
not be OSM any more.
--
Christoph Hormann
http://www.imagico.de/
------------------------------
I wouldn't mind if all the existing tags were replaced tomorrow with a brand new set of
"intelligently-designed" keys. And I wouldn't mind if these keys were enforced from now on. And I
wouldn't mind that I would have to relearn all the tagging I now know. Yes, it would be a "brave new
world," and not the OSM we know now. Someone some time ago on one of the OSM mailing lists summed up
the current situation by stating, "It seems OSM is incapable of moving forward." Unless we ever
have more structure, I agree.
Mark
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