Shaun McDonald wrote: >> As fine as it as a guideline, verifiability as a topic and was > Even so the on the ground rule and verifiability have not been on the wiki > for long. They have been the unwritten norms of the community since the
I'm all for referring to that verifiability where it comes to legal and physical attributes (e.g. access=yes/designated/no or building:levels or width), yet trying to squeeze by force the old tags to comply - to the letter - to that norm seems counter productive. As with car access on very rough tracks: there could be tens of tags to describe the ground clearance, wheel size and suspension travel etc. required to get through, but instisting people start measuring them is too much work that anyone else would start doing so - users require something simplified from that - even if there's no widely accepted solution yet. The description of a way for other users than cars varies on multiple axes and fitting all that into one tag seems impossible; yet it's most of the time reasonable and simple to divide the decision space into two sets: cycleway and footway and use additional tags from there on. Some ways then are borderline cases or sufficiently outside of those two sets that they necessitate some other solution. Most of the time the intended use is unambiguous, either signedposted or evident from the location or structure. Where it's not, I trust people can classify things on a closed scale, even if with some personal judgement And to make those cases easier, there is a need for something in addition to the footway/cycleway pair. (Where does a coniferous forest turn into a mixed forest? One birch? One birch for every ten pinetrees? 25:75 distribution?) Much of the discussion would have been avoided if the documentation of footway and cycleway had been more exact already in the fall 2007 - it took me then quite a lot of reading to get to the logic and implications behind them, and many don't read that much of the scattered documentation which has lead to some of the pages having been changed around and misconceptions. The big question is just how can that be fixed? Alv _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
