You say that and there was the discussion yesterday (or was it this morning? I can’t really remember) where you told SteveA that we don’t map zoning, but then other places your the first one to jump on the “any tag you like” and “let people map however they want to” bandwagon. So it seems like your inconsistent about it. Otherwise what’s difference with random users giving ratings compared to when you were all for people tagging however they want to (I’m not saying there isn’t one. I’m just carious what it is)?
Well, yes, that’s the opposite of what I was saying so you’re not speaking for me.
I think there’s value in having good and excellent (or some equivalent) because then you don’t have the ambiguity of:
- something doesn’t have intermediate or lower on it, so it’s good or excellent
- something doesn’t have intermediate or lower on it because no one has evaluated the visibility
Honestly at this point, I wouldn’t be entirely opposed to deprecating it and having it be a fallback for some of the better suggestions in other threads.
Add the key trail_visibility=* to a way that might have visibility issues, such as highway=path, highway=footway, highway=cycleway, etc. For ways that are paved, trail_visibility=* is assumed to be excellent and doesn’t need to be tagged.
Is the proposed text in question.
That makes sense to me.
Given the above, when would be not worth tagging? The average consumer of OSM data probably isn’t going to be reading a surface=gravel tag and then checking satellite data to make sure that the natural ground surface in the area isn’t gravel etc.
I think dirt roads etc are an obvious case of an unpaved way that doesn’t need it, but all paths/trails seem like they would benefit.
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I know, that’s exactly why I said I didn’t want to speak for 
I think that would be a good idea at least for the United States, if not globally, since we have multiple trail difficulty systems already that are official and people already now without having to decipher a cryptic wiki article or get in a super pedantic discussion here first before they can even use the tag. Let the Europeans have their Sac Scales, we can have our national park or the
Sierra Clubs systems, and people in the rest of the world can tag trails in their countries however they want to. Sac Scale clearly wasn’t made for hiking conditions in the United States though and I don’t think whatever system we come up would work well in Europe. At least not any better then Sac Scale already does.
I was wondering if you were unclear of what that phrase meant, or if you were trolling.
On that note, my previous comment was about trail_visibility, which has nothing to do with sac_scale or difficulty.
You say that and there was the discussion yesterday (or was it this morning? I can’t really remember) where you told SteveA that we don’t map zoning,
these are 2 different issues, we don’t map ratings because they are inherently subjective and cannot be checked on the ground, it is not expected that 2 random people issue the same rating, hence these fail the verifiability test
Zoning is different, because it cannot be verified on the ground but is not subjective and can be verified elsewhere. We cannot improve this kind of information, nor add to it, this is why it is usually considered out of scope. This kind of thing is still (IMHO) more compatible with what we do, compared to ratings.
but then other places your the first one to jump on the “any tag you like” and “let people map however they want to” bandwagon.
any tags you like to describe verifiable information.
That’s fair. The last part of your point is why I’m not into these types of tags. It’s to bad that’s so controversial though. I probably wouldn’t care as much if there was at least an across the board standard. It’s kind of unfair to treat star ratings one way and tags like trail visibility another. Not that I’m saying you or anyone else in the conversation is doing that, but I have seen other discussions where the lack of verifiability was way more of an issue then it seems to be here. Including with star ratings. I definitely can’t think of another discussion where someone was as maligned as I have been for saying a tag can’t be verified.
