[RFC] Feature Proposal - landcover proposal V2

Matija_Nalis · August 14, 2023, 1:36pm

(I apologize in advance for longish post, but I’ll try to summarize and format for easier reading).

I’d hazard to guess that many people who are apposed to the proposal do not say “thanks for addressing the problems” because:

they don’t think there is a (significant) problem in the first place
even if they think that some small part of proposal might make sense, the all the other things (i.e. mass-deprecation of massively used tags) are making the situation so mindbogglingly worse that thanking people for it is the furthest thing on their minds (if you’ll excuse the parable to drive the point: one does not feel compelled to thank the mass-murderer of your whole family because they’ve brought flowers to the funeral).
they feel that must follow the situation lest the lack of active opposition is seen as “implicit approval” thus leading to terrible outcome] of such proposal actually being accepted (“The price of liberty is eternal vigilance”, “The only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men should do nothing” and all that - such things have happened in the past in OSM too!) - thus they feel quite annoyed that they have to waste their time.

Some suggestions:

about the “but the new tags would be looking cleaner” leitmotif of the proposal: While I absolutely agree that is very fine and important idea when creating the new tags, it is completely reversed situation for existing tags in massive use and is horrible idea there. See Due diligence section of proposal process, and especially Everything is more complicated than expected. Please do not shrug this away, but give it serious consideration. To paraphrase Carl Sagan : “huge deprecations require huge improvements that the proposal would bring”, and the improvements offered are tiny, not huge. See this post in particular for details of problems with such proposals and why deprecations are a big deal.
wiki.osm.org is not Wikipedia. Tags are not natural English. Often they are partly based on British English, but the meanings are often subtly or not so subtly different, or even completely dazzling to professor of English. And this is OK. Let me repeat: That is OK. There is no need to fix that. It is not broken. Traffic signals are not Highways. Yet we use highway=traffic_signals, and that is OK and does not need fixing. Nor do we sell slaves specialized in cutting hair at shop=hairdresser. Etc. Trying to “fix” them to more appropriately resemble English language will bring huge amounts of pain for absolutely tiny amount of benefits. Please don’t do that.
one of the advantages being promoted is that it will make it easier for new (and advanced users). That is almost (but not completely) totally wrong. Basically all new users (and big percentage of advanced ones) will not use raw tags. Especially new users will use apps like iD or StreetComplete and click on Surface (or quest named What is the surface of this?) and choose Grass. They wouldn’t even know what the raw tags used are, whether it is surface=grass or landuse=grass or surface:wikidata=Q643352. Even advanced users of JOSM and Vespucci will use presets vast majority of the time. IOW, You’re attracting all that wrath of people by deprecating hugely popular raw tags with proposed new tags with same meaning, for almost no benefit at all (certainly no benefit to new users, nor majority of advanced users).
adding a new way to tag things won’t automagically make the old way go away (even with deprecations). To the contrary, it will lead to both new and old ways being used, thus actually increasing complexity and making the mapping harder to use, which is contrary to the stated intention if I understand it correctly. Obligatory xkcd: Standards
Here is what I would suggest as a way forward (since you asked). Please heed this paragraph seriously, it is the most important - instead of trying to push this lump sum mix of deprecations (which many people are against) and potentially useful usecases: scan this discussion for messages of people who are opposed to the proposal, and see what they (grudgingly) accept might be somewhat useful in some cases, as well as what they omit from their objections. Those are the things that might reach the community consensus.
Trim OUT of proposal everything that is not on that non-objectioned list, and keep it focused only on new tags which would allow one to tag something which has so far been IMPOSSIBLE to tag. That way, you’ll get a lot of buy-in. To quote Antoine de Saint-Exupéry: “Perfection is achieved, not when there is nothing more to add, but when there is nothing left to take away” - heed that advice, and you can get it good.

If that passes, later you can choose (or not) to attempt another proposal for more controversial things (safe in knowing that even if those controversial things do not gain community approval, at least the most useful part of the proposal would’ve been already accepted, instead of expected result that after all that time and effort the people are forced to reject even good part of the idea because it is mixed with all the bad stuff).
(general) regarding too heated discussion: someone could make a thread (and link it here) to change proposal process so that negative pre-votes are possible (i.e. leaving vote before voting period starts. It can always be changed if the updated proposal changes people mind, up until the end of the voting period).
Especially in such prolonged proposals like this one, it is very taxing for vigilant watchers to follow and worry that if they take the offline vacation such proposal might pass (especially as only tiny minority of OSM mappers ever participates in wiki proposal voting). Leaving no votes before the proposal is finished would allow people to vote no in advance, unsubscribe from such threads, and stop wasting their time, thus reducing such negative outbursts of people who’ve just been fed up more then enough. It would also have additional benefit of showing if a proposal is bad idea, so proponents might decide to not waste more of their time on it.
While I do not condone harsher voices that might’ve been used in the discussion, I can understand why people can feel such prolonged “beating of a dead horse” as kind of passive-agressive behaviour (“winning” by tiring out “opponents” until they can’t afford to waste any more time and give up. That is not “getting community consensus”). It might benefit the proposers to put themselves in other side shoes (as I try to put myself in proposer shoes, and would recommend other to do too). Not everyone has infinite amount of time to waste on such minutia.