On Tue, Aug 5, 2008 at 9:40 PM, Alex Mauer <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > Frederik Ramm wrote: >> I've never been a friend of that voting business but it seems to get >> more absurd every day. Is it perhaps time now to have a vote on >> abolishing votes altogehter - or should we continue to let people vote >> on whatever they like and ignore the results?
Hmm. It's a tough one, especially when 34 people (out of an electorate of, lets say, the 5,750 people editing last month) only narrowly agree on restructuring some of the most widespread tags in the db. The wiki, for better or worse, is most likely seen as authoritative by most of those 5,750 people and so I'd like it if everyone was a bit more cautious about changing what's said on there, especially when it comes to changing existing conventions/features, posting stuff that's contrary to established use, or confusing or complex topics. > I like Andy Allan's modifications to the Key:crossing page, suggesting > that it be used for documenting current usage, with renderers working > from that. So all you have to do to add a key or value is to use it. It's the way I like it, although the downside is that I'll often start tagging and rendering new stuff and forget to document it (or even add it to the key) (Ahem. Notice is hereby given that tagging cafes with "fryup=yes" is likely to get you a nice fork-in-a-sausage symbol on the cycle map :-) http://www.gravitystorm.co.uk/osm/?zoom=16&lat=6711490.40418&lon=-11750.44101&layers=B00 ) > It's unfortunate that current usage is so hard to find, particularly > outside of Europe... If anyone needs some real figures for these discussions, I'm more than happy to help. I only realised recently that tagwatch only covers Europe, which is unfortunate. So below is the list of ways using the highway tag with more than 100 instances. You can see that the highway=footway/cycleway/bridleway/pedestrian totals 509,920 instances (path has a respectible, but tiny by comparision, 2165). And everyone should remember the 509k instances mean that *lots* of different contributors use these tags and understand them; and there are *lots* of renders, routing algorthims and whatnot understand and use them too. So what are the advantages of the change? One scheme that covers the corner cases along with the most common occurences. And the disadvantages? Confusion for many contributors, every data user needing to understand two sets of tagging styles, the most common cases (the 509k) needing twice as many tags as before, and the corner cases are still fairly corner needing a small handful of tags. So in my opinion, the problem is the main tagging scheme wasn't well enough documented (a canal towpath is hardly a pedestrian precinct, which I came across today) to prevent arguments and misunderstandings, but the proposed upheaval and/or dual tagging regimes is overkill. A way to tag the corner cases that don't fit in well would have been much preferable. And you can throw in the term "cost/benefit" here as well, but I'm sure everyone gets my point by now. Cheers, Andy residential | 12605937 service | 2200128 unclassified | 1088886 | 529868 secondary | 510636 track | 417479 tertiary | 391691 footway | 320536 primary | 268507 motorway_link | 181060 cycleway | 97914 pedestrian | 84164 motorway | 81050 trunk | 70124 trunk_link | 27778 primary_link | 20594 steps | 19919 living_street | 13936 road | 8500 bridleway | 7306 unsurfaced | 6313 minor | 4010 path | 2165 construction | 1675 FIXME | 889 secondary_link | 738 byway | 630 footpath | 324 proposed | 277 bus_guideway | 133 stub | 120 _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
