On 28/01/16 19:16, David Marchal wrote:
Hello, there.
On a GitHub issue
(https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/issues/2027#issuecomment-174443685),
I've been told that Wiki tagging votes are only advisory and that the
community is only invited, neither required nor recommended, to follow
them. As I understand this comment, the community MAY follow the Wiki
tagging or votes, it does not SHOULD nor MUST follow them. I was under
the impression that the community at least SHOULD apply the votes
results, MUST looking unenforceable due to the free tagging principle.
Am I wrong on that? What is the applicability of the Wiki content?
Hoping my question isn't too trivial,
I'd say you might be a bit back-to-front. To me, the wiki works best as
a way to document the tags that get used in OSM, so people can see the
way tags get used for the object they have in mind. So the wiki doesn't
fit the 'SHOULD-follow' bill. OSM is a representation of the weird,
mixed-up, contradictory world as seen by people with a hugely diverse
way of looking at it. The OSM needs to reflect that, proscriptive wiki
pages do not reflect that.
The tagging list is a great example of this diversity. Lots of tags get
discussed there, but very few firm decisions ever come about, simply
because real-world examples keep throwing up differences, so tagging
needs to be able to reflect these.
Taginfo is a useful tool for looking at the diversity in OSM. Some
people look at the the diversity of tagging and see an opportunity to
harmonise to a single value: x. What TagInfo actually shows is that
there are many uses of the key and that x is not the only way to use the
tag, so why should they all be forced to be the same?
This diversity of tagging is often quoted as a problem for data
consumers. Oddly, this is often by people who don't actually use the
data but feel it must be awkward. Actually it's not. All OSM data has to
processed before use. This processing can be fairly straightforward or
really complex, but that's not much to do with tagging diversity.
Whatever the processing is (LUA code, SQL code or any other coding) it
only has to written once and can be used over and over again.
The wiki has its place, but it is certainly not the Oracle which holds
all the OSM truth.
--
Cheers, Chris (chillly)
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