On Sat, Oct 1, 2011 at 7:49 PM, Scott Rollins <organ...@gmail.com> wrote:
> > > On Fri, Sep 30, 2011 at 2:23 PM, Frederik Ramm <frede...@remote.org>wrote: > >> Really? Are there people who say "I'd rather not map because there is no >> consensus on the roads tagging"? Are those people the 20,000 missing mappers >> in the US? >> > > Yes. I'm one of them. I jumped in with both feet, when I first found OSM. I > lived in Canada at the time, and I walked around a village of 1,000 people > on my birthday and learned how to turn those GPS tracks into roads. But > years later, I still don't know what "the right way" is (because the > community still doesn't agree on what that means), and I don't feel like > wasting hours of my life doing something that will likely be undone because > my idea of the way things should be doesn't match whatever eventual > consensus emerges (or because the next person to come along thinks things > should be done differently). > > That these questions STILL haven't been settled after this many years > leaves me with doubts that OSM will ever be anything more than a toy in this > country. I keep mostly listening to this list, hoping for the day when I'm > proven wrong, because I want to work for a project with these goals, but not > if I'm going to waste my time because nobody can make the most basic of > decisions: how roads should be described. > Can I ask where you got this impression from? Perhaps we need to fix the communication... In the vast majority of cases, "how roads should be described" is decided. Editors like Potlatch and Cloudmade's Mapzen do a pretty good job of describing visually (via icons or words) which tags should be applied to which roads. The general hierarchy of motorway > trunk > primary > secondary > tertiary is (hopefully) well understood. The argument seems to be over where people want to draw the lines between those categories, and there are very few (loud) people arguing about it. Either way, applying highway tags to ways is a very small part of OSM: try adding POI, opening hours, parks, bike paths, McDonald's, libraries, town halls, pubs/bars, etc. All of this is very useful data and won't be subject to someone changing a highway tag.
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