On 10/01/19 10:13, Tobias Knerr wrote:
On 07.01.19 16:12, Bryan Housel wrote:
I encourage everyone to just disregard everything that’s on the wiki and go by
what taginfo says as far as how the tags are used and what the accepted values
are.
The wiki is an invaluable source for understanding OSM tagging, and I
use it all the time during mapping and when coding software that works
with OSM data.
Taginfo is an awesome resource as well, and I use it almost daily, but
it cannot fully replace the wiki. It tells you that foo=bar has been
used thousands of times, but it doesn't tell you what that tag means¹.
It also doesn't tell you about the conventions for its use (default
values, directionality, lots of other essential details). Ultimately,
Taginfo isn't documentation – the wiki is.
+1.
Taginfo does not tell me what landuse=clearing is. It only tells me there is
some of use of it.
There is no wiki page on it so there is no help there.
The next thing to do is contact the mappers.. tried that .. one response told
me to go to another channel - did that, nothing worth while.
Contact a mapper .. no response there either ...
Best I can do then is use my brain to think about the words and the mapping
context to come up with what I think they meant by it.
My conclusion is - if it is not documented on the wiki .. it does not exist.
Besides documenting current tagging practice, the wiki is also a useful
tool for coordinating and spreading new ideas (even though the specifics
of the process can be controversial at times). If you're not a software
developer or one of a few highly respected community members,
discussions on community channels and wiki proposals are pretty much
your only good options to make your genius tagging idea known to the
world. Without this first step, that idea is unlikely to get enough
traction to even show up in Taginfo to a meaningful extent: Using the
tag yourself only gets you so far.
The wiki also help differentiate between things that are close in appearance to
the casual mapper.
Things like a netball court can be mapped as a basketball court, until you can
see the difference and that is on OSM wiki pages.
For all these reasons, I consider the wiki a key asset to our project.
As a result, I spend a lot of time improving it, as do many other
community members. It hurts to see that some developers of core OSM
infrastructure seemingly value these contributions so little. To me,
people discussing and documenting our data model are a vital part of our
community. So are software developers, of course! It's my belief that
the project can only thrive if there's mutual respect between these groups.
Tobias
¹ Taginfo actually does provide a definition, but that's because it
extracts them from wiki pages.
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