Hi Dan et al., I completely agree with both sides here:
- Matthijs has worked really hard to consult the community and write-up what he plans to do. He has used the mechanisms which exist (wiki & the mailing list). - Using voting on the wiki as a means to determine if something has achieved a suitable consensus has never itself achieved any consensus in the British OSM community. as witnessed by the both of the strong NOs from, *inter alia*, Richard Fairhurst and Chris Hill. Extending a technique, which itself has at best luke-warm support does create an unfortunate precedent. Generally, voting on the wiki fails because a (self-selected) majority is not a consensus. Often it is merely a consensus that "we agree to differ". Consensus decisions often take time, and certainly can't be rushed. Although I did vote in the bookie/bookmaker decision, I will not participate in future wiki votes on mechanical edits (in general I usually regret the rare times I vote on the wiki, because it suggests I support a process which I think has manifold problems), but I will certainly resent it, if this means my opnion no longer is taken into account. My overall feeling about Matthijs various shop-related things is that I support the objectives. However, I think that, as no one has complained over much in the past 10 years about these things, we can afford to wait a few weeks or months before plunging in. (I suspect that one reason why no one has complained is that the retail datasets just aren't complete enough to be useful compared to, say, the recent one released by Geolytix. And please dont use this latter in OSM, they used Google for refining geolocation). So in summary: let all work on the documentation, discussions, but please work for consensus and recognise that allowing time to build that will result in an overall better dataset. Regards, Jerry On 1 November 2014 13:36, Dan S <[email protected]> wrote: > 2014-11-01 12:50 GMT+00:00 Richard Fairhurst <[email protected]>: > > Matthijs Melissen wrote: > >> Voting is now open for the proposal to unify the names of chain > >> shops within the UK by renaming them. > > > > No, it isn't. > > > > Mechanical edits stand or fall by their own merits. They cannot be ok-ed > by > > a vote. > > > > From the Automated Edits Code of Conduct: "We do not require or > recommend a > > formal vote, but if there is significant objection to your plan - and > even > > minorities may be significant! - then change it or drop it altogether." > > > > We historically have a low tolerance of mechanical edits and imports in > the > > UK; we prefer to make large-scale changes by hand. That is one of the > > reasons why the OSM map of the UK is so good. A "come one, come all" > vote on > > the wiki can be trivially gerrymandered into supporting your proposals > > without any proof of approval by the people who are affected by such a > bulk > > change, i.e. UK mappers. > > > > I am not sure where you got the idea of a "vote" for mechanical edits > > (Wikipedia? wiki.osm.org tag pages?), but there is no precedent for it > in > > OSM and I would ask you to withdraw it. > > The "rationale" part of the webpage* seems to me to set out Matthjis' > perspective on why to ask for a vote. > > Also, Matthijs sent out an RFC email proposing this whole process - he > got lots of feedback (which he has taken into consideration), but > no-one objected to the voting mechanism. It's not your fault if you > only just noticed this happening, of course, but it's a little rude to > declare "No it isn't" in the sense of shutting him down when he's > proceeding in such an open and consultative manner. Lots of people > have discussed Matthijs' proposed changes in the RFC thread and now > this thread. To me, it seems a good example of consultation. > > Cheers > Dan > > * > https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Mechanical_Edits/Math1985/UK_Shop_Names > > _______________________________________________ > Talk-GB mailing list > [email protected] > https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk-gb >
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