Hi, Eugene Alvin Villar wrote: > What's so hard about standardizing on the boolean values given > appropriate changes to editor presets, good wiki documentation, and a > deprecation period for other boolean values?
It's a kind of slippery slope situation. There is fear that once it has been proven that standardisation works for true/false values, there will be demands to standardise everything else as well. This would be positive for the users of our data in the short term because it means they would not have to interpret the data; however it would remove dynamism from the project and require mappers who want to invent something new to apply to the standardisation committee first, and we feel that this would be a severe detriment to further participation on the mapper side. OSM flourishes partly because mappers feel that they can help shape the project, and contribute what they think is important, rather than just being mechanical turks (without the payment). In the long term, standardisation would kill the project, and thus not be desirable even for our users. - Coming from the outside and not having the knowledge about OSM that we have, users can be forgiven to demand things that would ultimately destroy OSM, but it is our duty to educate them and to explain to them that they can either take OSM as it is, with some interpretation required, or they can demand that OSM change but that would, in the long run, probably mean no OSM at all. I run a small company that, among other things, sells standardised derivates of OSM data. I spend a lot of time trying to stay ahead of the game, analyse what tags people use and for what, and try and convert these into consistent and reliable values. If OSM changes from "landuse=forest" to "russ_nelson_sees=trees" because that's what mappers what to use, then I can adapt and my customers don't have to, and neither does the OSM community have to twist and turn just because some users want consistent tagging. In my eyes, this is the way to deal with standardisation - do not force it upon the mappers, but instead create a "filter layer". In my case this is a commercial operation, but I have been suggesting for ages that instead of writing bots to streamline OSM data, why don't people write generic filters/standardising engines that take the "chaotic" OSM data as of today and produce well-ordered standardised output for people "out there" who cannot be bothered to keep up with OSM's tagging anarchy? It would not be too hard. And I'm not saying this because of my business (until now, keeping up with changes and doing the standardisation takes more work than I get paid for it so I would benefit from OSM itself being standardised); I truly believe that the way things work in OSM, with "standards" being un-enforceable and people constantly deviating from them (even if there is a certain base consensus on many things) is the only way it *can* work without degrading into some kind of Google Map Maker that does not look for project members, but for worker ants. Bye Frederik _______________________________________________ talk mailing list [email protected] http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
