On Thu, May 23, 2019 at 7:39 PM Frederik Ramm <[email protected]> wrote: > In general, our project isn't a top-down strictly managed project with a > controlled decision-making process. This means that many things have to > be discussed over and over, and the community generally doesn't speak > with one voice. But this also gives us some resilience; there's no one > "tag central command" that someone could take over and dictate what we > are to do.
I think at the root of the complaints in this thread is the idea - justified or not - that the maintainers of iD are attempting to arrogate that role unto themselves. To the extent that they are, it is probably because the discussion forums on tagging - at least, this list - are too cacophonous to inform their decisions about what tags to present in iD. Where consensus fails here - as, in my experience, it almost always does for any question that isn't answerable by tagging that was well established years before I got here - the iD developers are really faced with the decision: implement some arbitrary choice that makes sense to them, or do nothing about helping iD users to map the feature in question. That matches my experience with mapping. On the few occasions that I've asked a tagging question in here, any useful answers are lost in a din of conflicting opinions. That's fine if the sole purpose of the mailing list is to explore the tagging strategy - it is by talking these things to death, over and over, that consensus is built - painfully slowly. In the meantime, I run the opinions through the mental filters of "what do they have in common" and "what from among the rest makes sense to *me*?" and map my feature accordingly. I'd imagine that the iD team is forced to employ a similar process. So far I've gotten away with it. If anyone complains, I can retag. If anyone reverts, I can leave the feature unmapped. Obviously, though, my tagging affects only the relatively small fraction of OSM's features that I map, while iD's tagging has a much bigger impact. That's why nobody takes me to task for rogue tagging, while iD appears constantly to be under fire. I'm not sure it's fixable. We need both the passionate argument about the right way to do things, and someone who can decide for each tool what that tool will consider to be the best current practice. Those who get angry at not getting their way will get angry. If the mailing list is to serve as a debating forum for what tagging practice ought to be in the medium or far future - a function that is needed - it will not be very effective at informing anyone of best _current_practice. They're slightly different jobs, and we're not very good at separating them. Even Overpass and taginfo queries seem to be more effective at determining whether a tag is accepted in current practice, and of course we all know that has to be taken with a grain of salt. _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list [email protected] https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
