Hi, On 25.04.2013 19:07, John Baker wrote:
The wiki is a consensus of opinion over the years about how to tag things.
It isn't. There have been more than enough cases where after *years* it was found that somewhere hidden away in a wiki page there was a statement that was absolutely not reflecting any kind of consensus. There are, regularly, votes in which Wiki users decide to "deprecate" some tag used by thousands, and replace it with something else - all that with 20 people participating and voting.
We aim to make the Wiki a good documentation of our work in OSM, but where Wiki and practice diverge, practice rules. That's why before you take some wiki page and interpret it as code to modify the database, you are expected to discuss - to make sure that (a) the wiki page is right, (b) your reading of the wiki page is right, (c) the algorithm you are planning to apply has no unfortunate side effects, and so on.
To be honest I am less likely to engage in discussion about future edits as all they will seem to end in is: always message the original editor, always do a manual survey and you don't know what you are doing - all of which I strongly disagree with.
As long as you're making manual edits you can get away with a lot; people will assume that if you make a specific change then you have valid reasons for that (e.g. some kind of additional source rather than just an algorithm). Any sort of mechanical mass-edit requires discussion so if you don't feel like discussing then you must not make the edit.
There's scope for widely accepted automatic or mechanical edits. Some guy in Germany removes, I believe, trailing spaces from names - but only in Germany because he hasn't discussed this idea outside. It is also very unlikely that you find someone who objects to e.g. automaticall yreplacing the mis-typed "highway=residentail" with "highway=residential". But even such simple things should, if applied in a wider scope, be discussed beforehand - out of politeless if nothing else, but also to avoid a potential flaw in your reasoning to go undetected.
Someone once replaced all name=McDonalds with name=McDonald's, arguing that that was the correct name of the fast food chain but accidentally renaming a couple of totall different things that were really called McDonalds. A short discussion beforehand could helped to avoid that mistake.
Re. your latest point "you don't know what you're doing" - my impression is that your attitude is "I know better anyway", an attitude that is problematic enough in mappers but becomes inacceptable as soon as people make large-scale edits.
Bye Frederik -- Frederik Ramm ## eMail [email protected] ## N49°00'09" E008°23'33" _______________________________________________ Talk-GB mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb
