Roland Olbricht wrote: > Imperfect Flow of Information > > Although many parts of the OpenStreetMap project are well > translated, the tagging documentation has substantial deficiencies.
Yep. Documentation is the biggest problem with tagging. I don't actually think it's the wiki per se that's the issue. The wiki is... wiki-like. It's an untidy encyclopaedia of people's preoccupations at the time they were moved to edit it. Yes, it does have problems: as you say, "tag definitions being changed after the tag is in widespread use" (remember the infamous edit that added access=no as a default for all barrier= values?). But the challenge is bigger than that. The main thing we're missing is curated, simple information on the main tags that are _used_. Just as switch2osm took the infinite pages of install docs on the wiki and boiled them down to one how-to, we need a simple guide to the common tags in OSM: if you are a data consumer, these are the tags you need to understand. Wikis don't work for this. It needs an editor/curator/whatever, to have clear editorial guidelines, and probably to run on the pull request model rather than open editing. We're also missing a single-page explanation of OSM tagging principles. One of the frustrations of watching this list is that there are quite a lot of plain bad proposals that betray a misunderstanding of basic principles (verifiability, rich meaningful tags, optimise for the mapper, no-one is obliged to parse your new tag, etc. etc.). Life is too short to explain this to everyone and, to be honest, the uber-keen tag proposer doesn't want to hear their proposal rubbished in the first five minutes so won't listen anyway. Writing down "this is how OSM tags work" would solve a lot of this heartache. Richard -- Sent from: http://gis.19327.n8.nabble.com/General-Discussion-f5171242.html _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
