On Tue, Feb 5, 2019 at 5:56 PM Graeme Fitzpatrick <graemefi...@gmail.com> wrote: > What concerns me a bit, is that there are 750000+ OSM mappers, which is > great! But it would seem that there are only ~50 (? - someone would know) > members of "Tagging", with only ~20 of those being active (which I would call > contributing to list discussions more than once a week). So 20 of us are > deciding which tags 750000 mappers should use, & pretty well have the vote of > life or death to new proposals!
The vast majority of those mappers are inactive, maybe one in ten or twenty actually maps regularly. And the vast majority of those 40000 or so are entirely content to map features for which good existing tagging exists. Only a handful of us are actually interesting in pushing the frontier of what is mappable. That's not necessarily alarming. > I know the list is open for anyone to subscribe to, & join in discussions as > they see fit, but I'd think that a lot of newbie mappers would have a read of > the occasionally strident, & sometimes scathing, comments made towards > proposals here & think, Woah, I'm not going in there! :-( Yeah. I stick around because I'm an open-sourcerer from way back, and have already come to understand that having the first reaction to a proposal be a chorus of 'it s*ks' (where the asterisk, is of course, replaced by 'tin' ;)) is high praise. It indicates that what you're doing is important enough to capture the attention and excite the passion of commenters - and that it's near enough the mark that they're willing to tell you how to improve it. The real killer is the people who smile and tell you 'very nice.' They don't care. Frankly, I've found no forum in which it's possible to get sound tagging advice - if I can't find something for myself on the Wiki, taginfo, overpass, etc., I'm better off sending private mail to a few other, more experienced, mappers whom I trust. It's not worth the effort of discussing any new ideas on this list until I have not only a well-fleshed-out proposal, but also some experience with mapping the feature in question. (And I will confess to being less than assiduous about wikifying what I've done.) There are people who are profoundly uncomfortable with the way that a 'folksonomy' works, or who are also data consumers who are acutely aware of the limitations of such a process in terms of getting usable data in a repeatable representation. For this reason, uniform tagging is important - but we have a history of achieving that through the messy and inconsistent 'bottom up' process and the principle of 'he who does the work makes the rules.' A 'top-down' process where some data analyst or small team prescribes the tagging would no doubt have resulted in a tidier and more consistent model - but it would likely have let to a more limited one, with less mapper engagement. Moreover, it would have embodied the cultural assumptions of the people who created it, and struggle to model features that do not exist or are very different in another culture. The messy 'wiki-style' process, I think, yields more robust results in the long run, but $LC_DEITY, it's painful to participate in. ("Those who eat sausage and respect the law should not watch either one being made," and making data models is very like making laws.) It's important for all participants to remember just how much everyone's patience is strained, and try to be gentle. _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging