On Tue, Sep 1, 2009 at 6:28 PM, Ed Avis<e...@waniasset.com> wrote: > By analogy, when adding a street to OSM, most editors do not just show a > blank textbox > and expect the user to enter key=value pairs manually. They show a few > common choices, > which have been agreed on by the OSM community (whether 'de facto', by common > usage, > or 'de jure', by some arcane wiki voting procedure - but either way, some > kind of > agreement). I suspect that if all OSM editors merely popped up a dialogue > box with blank > fields and the user documentation 'just use tags', the growth of the project > would be > a bit slower than it is.
You need more understanding of the history of how OSM grew - the editors did used to just throw up blank textboxes and everything worked fine. The usage came first, then consensus, then presets. Documentation was in there somewhere, to varying extents! > That would certainly work. To me, this seems a bit 'rude' in some way; > wouldn't it be > better for the JOSM developers to first build consensus around some proposed > tagging > system, before implementing it unilaterally? No. It wasn't rude when I started rendering Sustrans' mileposts - the objects were tagged, so I got cracking. Consensus was achieved by tagging, then it got rendered. Not by presets, nor by discussing -> presets -> tagging, which is what you're trying to do. > But as long as the end result is that we > have some agreed way of tagging GPX traces with the information wanted, Maybe this is the point you're missing - we already have conventions on tagging GPS traces. "car" outnumbers "motorcar" by orders of magnitude. It doesn't take long plugging words into the tag search to see that many people are tagging with the forms of transport used. So let's consolidate that by using the tags (could be both, in the case of motorcar/car) and encouraging the however-many-percent that aren't tagged already to become tagged. I don't tag my traces because there's no point. If there was a menu I wouldn't bother because there's no point. Make there be a point. > Oh, I agree that usage is the first step. But we won't get people using any > tagging > system for foot vs bicycle vs motorcar unless there is some obvious way to > specify > this info when you upload. Just giving the user a blank textbox doesn't cut > it. Rubbish. People will put tags in when it's either useful to them or useful to others. When it's useful, it can then be improved. Working on improving the UI to enter information that nobody is using is bass-ackwards. Cheers, Andy _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
