On 19/02/12 23:38, Steve Bennett wrote:
On Mon, Feb 20, 2012 at 2:53 AM, Chris Hill<o...@raggedred.net> wrote:
I do not agree with the whole basis of this thread.
There are no such things as approved tags, tagging is open and people are
free to use *any* tags they like.
...
Advertise your ideas and encourage acceptance. Show how well it works any
How would you know whether a tag had "acceptance"? Wouldn't
documenting it somewhere make sense? Maybe...in a wiki?
I did say document and discuss the OP.
What would you
call "acceptance"? Would "approved" be a reasonable synonym for that?
No. It implies some official status that leads people to remove other
tags, sometimes with mass edits.
The wiki and (currently broken) approval mechanism is not some
horrible bureaucracy that exists to ruin your life. It's there so we,
as a community, can document the tags we use, and agree on how we use
them. While it's ok to spontaneously invent a new tag and use it to
solve your current problem, you can surely see the benefits of
everyone eventually converging on the same tag?
And if so, what would you do with all the old tags that people used
before you converged? Wouldn't you "deprecate" them?
No, some tags will wither away, fine. Some seemingly similar tags will
exist side-by-side and that is fine too. Most importantly, distinctive
differences can emerge too.
Just think this through. Approval implies some sort of enforcement,
without enforcement what is the point of approval? Just who would make
this enforcement happen and how? What would that do to an open project?
If only approved tags are used then how would mappers map what they
actually see? Wait weeks for some committee to discuss, argue and
approve or reject the tag? If you are free to use any tag, what is an
approval process for?
If approval or 'acceptance' means a tag is rendered or used in a router
or whatever then which tool do you mean? There are hundreds run by OSM
and other organisations, companies and individuals.
Flattening the tag structure by homogenising tags is destroying the fine
detail, sometimes carefully crafted by mappers and I will continue to
speak out against mass edits that attempt to do just that.
--
Cheers, Chris
user: chillly
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