On 10/09/2009 11:07, Roy Wallace wrote: > On Thu, Sep 10, 2009 at 7:02 PM, David Earl <[email protected]> > wrote: >>> Having two different ways to tag a particular entity is not the best >>> solution when building a database, IMHO. >> Indeed, but when we have an anarchic rather than specified tagging system, >> this is the least of our problems! > > If you don't care, fine. But please don't suggest things that you > admit aren't good solutions.
I'm not suggesting it - that's the way it already is. I care much more about stability than the prettiness of how the tags are named. There's two similar names for something, so that's life, live with it. And I think the discussion of committees to decide or better voting is a hiding to nothing so long as a sizeable proportion of the community doesn't believe in it, as they'll just carry on doing what they've always done. They've stopped even contributing to these discussions, they just get on with it. If we want OSM to be adopted at the data level, we have to stop changing tags because people think they look prettier. It's like MS changing the file format for Word with no compatibility support - a sure fire way to lose customers. Backward compatibility hasn't been too much of an issue within a closed community of consumer tools, but that's changing and if we don't take backward compatibility seriously, we'll end up staying just a closed community. And before someone says "but that means you can never change anything" I'm not saying that, merely that it needs a much less casual approach to changing things, especially for aesthetic reasons which this essentially is, than dealing with new ones which can be dealt with more freely. David _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
