Hi all, I have got into the duty to talk about tagging governance on the SotM and I would like to develop that opportunity towards something that is rather helpful in the long term. To ensure that I am on the right track and not unintentionally after a personal agenda I would like to ask you to comment on the findings so far listed below.
This is a copy of the message to talk@. As a courtesy to your fellow mappers I suggest to keep the discussion in one thread and reply there. Imperfect Flow of Information Although many parts of the OpenStreetMap project are well translated, the tagging documentation has substantial deficiencies. Over a random sample of 10 tags the number of declared languages varies between 2 and 18, but only few are complete and up to date (sample: 2 of 10 for German, 3 of 10 for French). Another kind of imperfect information flow is that tag definitions can be changed on the wiki page long after the tag is in widespread use. The converse case that a tag is introduced without any documentation is also happening. While this happens by ordinary users usually slow enough to make sense of the added data, an import or organized edit might be able to substantially skew the de facto meaning of a tag, regardless whether it is in widespread use, documented, both, or none. More Structure needed The translation issues have been conflated with a different problem: Different features may look very different between regions. E.g. highway=primary and highway=unclassfied versus highway=track need different sets of examples in Germany and the urban US on the one hand and Iceland or rural Africa on the other. It is easy to mix this with the translation into the predominant language in the area, but the tagging challenges in Belgium, Canada, and Niger are substantially different, although all three countries happen to have French as official language. Conversely, there is no sane reason to change tagging rules every block of houses in Brussels. Additionally, people often have different search terms than the British English tag names or their translations, and the wiki search engine is infamous for its bad performance. Having explicit keywords to direct the attention of a mapper to the list of possibly fitting tags might help. A substantial problem source of the concept of proposals is that it interacts with lots of tags in a nontrivial way and is practically never properly applied to all affected tag definitions. A proposal currently is an extra page although it should have much more an impact like a Git commit, grouping changes across various tag definition pages in a single changeset. Legitimacy and Governance What legitimation has a process if only a handful of people have that have the time to write mails on a mailing list and to write wiki pages are involved? In particular, if the proposals end up as being full of contradictions or vague terms and leave necessary answers undefined. Yet these still are the people that have shown the necessary long-term endurance to assure maintenance and that do the work. Thus every change to replace processes with better processes must be geared towards broadening not narrowing the base of long-term maintainers. Conversely, I fully understand mappers that are wary of sudden changes in the rendering or the access to tags in edting software. A lot of people whould probably appreciate to better understand what happens on the way from a tag discussion to a final change in the renderer or editing software. These processes are not secret, but often under-documented. Again, the various discussion channels and the lacking information flow contribute to the bad mood. Even worse, the ratio between people and channels means that evil or just plainly incompetent people could easily take over some channels and contribute substantially to the confusion. Good ideas how to redirect people and close down some of the channels (e.g. wiki discussion pages) might be worth pursuing. On top of that the wiki history is so much less helpful than what developers are nowadays used to from version control systems that borrowing methaphors and paradigms from there to the tag documentation is worth consideration. This hopefully helps to foster that the authors of the documentation and the mappers using a tag actually agree on its meaning. Best regards, Roland _______________________________________________ Tagging mailing list Tagging@openstreetmap.org https://lists.openstreetmap.org/listinfo/tagging
