On Tue, Jun 25, 2013 at 1:57 PM, Mulone Moligiangi <mul...@rome.com> wrote:
> I'm working on the tagging process, trying to understand how it works on the > wiki and how people reach consensus on difficult issues. The OSM community > will see the results in academic articles. How it works *on the wiki*, or how it works on the data? There's a correlation between these two datasets, but you cannot say that because something is documented on the wiki that it has reached any sort of consensus. I think it's 3% of OSM users are responsible for 80-something percent of all OSM data (the exact number was presented at SF) That means there thirty-six thousand contributors who are making the vast majority of the map. The problem for someone studying the process it that the tagging list (and the wiki) are more proscriptive than descriptive. In other words, many people who are on the list, and active, are people who want to tell others how they should map, rather than actually going out and mapping. In these cases, the tagging in the DB and the tagging in the wiki are not the same. So to understand how "consensus" is formed (using your terminology), you'd have to look at far more than the wiki. You'd have to look at what's done in practice, and then you'd need to examine the data products (rendered data, routing data) as well as what the editors decide to include or not to include as a preset. I'd argue that consensus is formed not from the wiki as much as from from the editors, and the renderers, and taginfo. In fact, you may find that the wiki doesn't relate to common practice in many cases. - Serge _______________________________________________ talk mailing list talk@openstreetmap.org http://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/talk
