Hi, Tom Chance wrote: > 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
Perhaps it really *is* useless and it was good that our process demonstrated that? > 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 In my eyes, it is not required that the same tagging rules are used all over the world. It may be a pet peeve of mine but I think that the majority of people take this as given without ever spending a second thinking about whether this might not create more problems than it solves. We solve loads of very complex problems all the time - are we really sure that we are unable to cope with a database in which, say, Canada uses a slightly different tagging scheme than does Scandinavia? Do we really have to steamroll everyone in the whole world into submission to some sort of consensus with people on the other side of the planet? > 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. I think that "consensus" is totally overrated. "Rough consensus" makes sense, but we have that, and everything else will work itself out eventually. All this talk about OSM being useless if consensus doesn't exist for the smallest detail is just scaremongering by people who cannot cope with complexity or diversity. Bye Frederik _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk