(Informal) Proposal: Recommend using `board:title=*` over `name=*` to tag the title of an `information=board`?

General talk
80

Then we agree on that point; that is good!

Just one more issue you should be aware of: the (never-ending) debate on description-vs-prescription. OSM Wiki serves as a kind of cummunity-edited dictionary of the meaning of OSM terms, just like regular dictionary might do for the natural language, so it faces pretty similar challenge.

As such, there are (at least) three main factions of OSM mappers:

  • “OSM wiki prescriptionists” - people who believe that the act of writing something in OSM wiki makes it binding on all OSM mappers (or even making it outright “truth” in extremist sub-factions), and that people must (and will) follow it. Those seem further divided in two main streams :

    • those accepting only things that come out of proposal process as proper (those are usually comprised of folks who would generally believe in things like e.g. direct democracy)
    • those of the opinion that whatever they put in wiki is the rule just because they think it is proper, and it is there documented on the wiki, and will engage in edit wars with people disagreeing with them and trying to change the wiki.[1]

  • “OSM wiki ignoramus” - people who (mostly or completely) ignore the wiki, and instead rely (depending on their sub-faction) purely on tag usage and/or their own ideas. (Carto renderer project itself is one of the big examples here)

  • “OSM wiki descriptionists” - people who believe that OSM mappers do as they like, and best we can do is try to describe how people actually use it in the wiki to try reduce confusion (Lady Luck willing) and help steer toward unification those seeking such guidance. Majority of them might realize that too many people will use ATYL regardless of any efforts, and that this cannot be changed via wiki or otherwise (at least not without breaking the very foundations of OSM)

Of course, the delineation is not as hard. For example, I myself would say I’m mostly descriptionist, but I do believe that actual tag usage is “overriding truth”[2], and I do favor the proposal process – but not because I believe it is somehow binding on OSM community, but because of Linus’s law: " given enough eyeballs, all bugs are shallow"[3]

Thus, you might perhaps better understand my own reluctance between mapping reality (i.e. taginfo) vs. documented (best?) practice.

  1. e.g. the likes of User:Rtfm, who might eventually end up being banned as a result if they persist ↩︎

  2. even if I do think wiki is useful in its own right, and will often consult it when making decisions ↩︎

  3. i.e. that given proper effort, it will generally produce better tags, as people will spot problems with original suggestion which might make it less usable or ambiguous later ↩︎

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Smoothness on highway=steps