Nic, > It is very easy to sit back and say we'll let the community fix the > tagging over time. It is even conceivable that some players who build a > business around OSM (and I'm not mentioning names here) may secretly > want the tagging mayhem to continue because they already have software > to work around the issues and they view that as a competitive advantage.
It is conceivable but would be very short-sighted of them. I can't speak for others of course but if I had something that neatly streamlined OSM data and removed the "issues" then I would try to make the community (and first and foremost the renderers) use it - because that would be the only way to make sure it works across the breadth of OSM and stays in sync with what's en vogue. And as for competitive advantage - that'd be gone with the new license anyway. > It's another thing to be involved and choose a side. It is my honest belief that if all those fixed-rule-enthusiasts had their way, OSM would become uninteresting, mappers reduced to drones filling out forms that other people have provided for them. It might become more commercially viable (with businesses fighting over what presets get put into the most widely-used editors so that drones will create more valuable data), but if I had to choose I'd rather be part of an interesting project than one that's commercially viable. > Something very simple is the ability to add tags for which no > documentation exist (on the wiki). Someone who does that either made a > spelling mistake, is too lazy to write documentation, or, even worse, > did not bother to look at what other people did. And writing software to > prohibit this is quite easy. Very good, you've come far already: 1. You have named the problem: "Tagging mayhem!" 2. You have found the culprit: Lazy mappers. 3. You know they are bad people, because they are either not diligent enough, or lazy, or careless. 4. You suggest technical means for getting rid of them: "Prohibit!" Nothing personal but this is because I react badly to all these rules discussions. Mappers are reduced to lazy idiots, and software has to be written to make them useful. I don't like the thinking behind this. We are a project to which people contribute out of their free will in their spare time. We are not a meat grinder. Having said that, if lack of documentation is your main concern, I could well envisage a pop-up in JOSM that goes: "You have just entered a tag that is not documented on the Wiki. Please provide one line of documentation for this new tag in the language of your choice, or click here if you do not want to be asked about this tag again". Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail frede...@remote.org ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk