On Tue, 11 Aug 2009 10:23:09 +0200, Frederik Ramm wrote: > Tom Chance wrote: >>> Well the hurdle to jump to change an existing tagging should certainly >>> be much higher than the hurdle to introduce a new tag for something that >>> hasn't been tagged before. >> >> Which is precisely why I made a simple proposal for a new process in >> these >> situations. > > But isn't what TomH writes above exactly what we have? If you introduce > something new that was never tagged before, you simply tag it any way > you think makes sense and it is *very* unlikely that you will run into > criticism; a few months down the road, when someone else asks how this > thing should be tagged, you could say that you've been using this and > that for a while now and he can just do the same. > > On the other hand, if your desire is to change something that already > exists and ask people to tag it differently from now on, or even worse > if you want people to agree on a blanket automatic change of millions of > existing objects, then you'll have a much harder time convincing people > that this is required. > > All this without any formal quorum or vote.
No, this isn't exactly the happy situation TomH writes about. The highway=path example illustrates two dysfunctions with the current anarchic approach: 1 – Nobody can actually agree what highway=path means so it is being used in different senses all over the world, which reduces its usefulness to near zero 2 – One of the senses in which it is used, which was a large part of its original proposal, did in fact duplicate or deprecate existing tags (some of the oldest and most commonly used tags, in fact). Now we have them both operating in parallel, which is pointless and problematic for reasons previously explained We currently have no process for dealing with these problems, nor with (for example) the evident shortcomings of natural world / countryside tagging, as the hopeless disagreements around forest/wood illustrate. The OSM community can either pretend that we live in a world of perfect information and emergent consensus, or we can grow up and take a leaf out of every other successful open source project and set-up some processes where consensus is more difficult to reach. Regards, Tom _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
