Tagging practice and ever-recurring undiscussed Wiki edits

you can’t compare the situation of the early days with today. In the early days, you really could change definitions of “important” tags and nobody might notice for a long time (and most tags weren’t codified anyway and were difficult to find because templates were used to a lesser extent), today there are many eyes on the wiki and if you make important changes to tags in significant use without consultation, chances are high it will get reverted if it is disputed. To give an example, say someone operates a business which has vital interest in some cyclespecific tags, I would expect them to monitor the relevant pages and raise the issue if someone makes dubious edits to these definitions.

Regarding your example of the barrier-tag “default”, I do not have the impression this general “no”-definition has stuck, so somehow it did work out and things have been fixed. It may have been timeconsuming to find an agreement and document it, as discussing things is always more onerous compared to having a hierarchy of a few decision makers who decide for everybody and no questions taken, but the hope is that the result is more appropriate for our setting and values.

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No, the wiki is not ideal. Yes, the wiki provides enough detail and redundancy to be useful when making up my mind how to map things. Especially in combination with taginfo, the usage status, quality control and quality assurance tools, the built-in history, and the communities.

If I thought the wiki were authoratitive, I would often be disappointed. If I thought the wiki were purely descriptive, I would often be disappointed. As it is, it’s a mix and you have no guarantees, you can’t trust it blindly. It often means there is a bandwidth of options, so I have to think about it, look around, ask around, then make up my mind and decide. Decide which way to go, or decide do spend my time on something else.
The fact that the wiki can’t be trusted blindly, actually helps to move OSM mapping forward, keeping mappers, data users, renderers, developers and users on their toes.

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It is absolutely still a problem with the wiki now that tag definitions get changed there that does not reflect usage. A “someone is wrong on the internet” mindset is very much normal human nature, and it’s actually quite hard to put that aside and try and look at things more objectively.

The advantage that a pull request model has is that everyone gets to discuss it before any change is made. There have been attempts to do this - here is one; here is essentially another. The latter has many of the same sort of contentious submissions as the OSM wiki but there’s a filter that ensure that changes where we (as a community) “just aren’t sure” don’t get applied.

The challenge is that it’s significantly more work to do that than “just editing a wiki page”. I look after some of the pages at https://switch2osm.org/serving-tiles/ and know hard it is** to make sure that that is “not wrong”, before even worrying about the things that it’d be nice to have there that aren’t there currently.

** The last series of updates here, here, here, and here needed many weekends of testing, software debugging, writing munin scripts that didn’t already exist etc.

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| SomeoneElse Andy Townsend Support moderator
March 14 |

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dieterdreist:

you can’t compare the situation of the early days with today

It is absolutely still a problem with the wiki now that tag definitions get changed there that does not reflect usage.

yes, it still happens, what I wrote was that it will likely be reverted soon or very soon if it is about “important” tags with many uses (and in the English version, I am looking at 3 languages in the wiki and if it is not English, the probability to find something strange is much higher), You won’t have something like the default for barrier or highway changed, but now there are also much more documented tags than in the early days, so it may still happen. If you appoint someone as the maintainer, and s/he develops their own ideas how things should be, the damage would be much bigger, think about ID presets. We might overcome this with more people and having a group stear it together, but this model will very likely slow down the development of new tags significantly, look at Carto, it has become fairly “stable” with not so many changes in recent years https://github.com/gravitystorm/openstreetmap-carto/graphs/code-frequency

The advantage that a pull request model has is that everyone gets to discuss it before any change is made. There have been attempts to do this - here is one; here is essentially another. The latter has many of the same sort of contentious submissions as the OSM wiki but there’s a filter that ensure that changes where we (as a community) “just aren’t sure” don’t get applied.

I don’t understand the “filter” part, isn’t the Wacky Warehouse still as pub in the NSI?

wiki has many problems and maybe alternatives would be better - but votes dominated by sock puppets is not one of them. Unless you can link cases where it happened, other than the detected and blatantly obvious RTFM[1] case?

[1] actual username

has it happened because you initially implemented code based on false claims or because someone edited page and everyone obeyed rather than reverting them?

If you expect it to be Bible that can be blindly followed - then it is an utter failure and always was.

In my experience whenever you want to do some serious project involving OSM tagging a large part of using Wiki goes into review/fixing/discussion of fixes for discovered contradictions, false claims and confusion. Nevertheless wiki remains useful.

Surface=fine_gravel - is it for loose gravel or duplicate of surface=compacted is an example of discussion I started on encountering dubious wiki documentation (instead of following it blindly) - and unless someone else did it, wiki still needs to be updated based on discussion there. Other wiki pages about surface also had some wild false claims that I in part fixed (with review by others and so on) but also had useful info that I would be unaware about without the wiki.

Opening_hours:covid19 tag - 2023 discussion is another that I posted recently.

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“Wacky Warehouse” is in the NSI as a pub brand. It is associated with pub operator Greene King. As I mentioned in that thread, I don’t think that it’s wrong to describe “Wacky Warehouse” as a pub brand; in the example I gave in the thread the pub has both “Greene King” and “Wacky Warehouse” branding. Both brands have a website, and you can find that pub from both brands’ websites.

Maybe there should be a warning on the main page of the Wiki that makes it clear what the articles say are only recommendations and should not be taken as facts, rules, guidelines, standards, or anything else that insinuates the Wiki is authoritative. I think that would solve a lot of these problems or at least it curb some of the needless back and forth about if it is or not. You can’t really expect people to not use it as an authoritative source of information if there isn’t a disclaimer anywhere saying it isn’t one though. A lot of these issues have more to do with the lack clarity when it comes most of these things then it does anything else. That’s just human nature. Conflicts and disagreements are bound to happen when there’s literally zero long-term standards, policies, guidelines, or anything else and everything is decided in the moment through micro-committees or whatever.

Well, exactly. I’m not aware of any other reference work where I have to spend hours fixing it before I can reliably use it.

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One aspect that is getting a bit lost is that the wiki isn’t monolingual. Some of the disjointness of things can be explained and is due to tags being developed and documented in a language other than English or/and translations in both directions going awry.

The 2nd order issue on top of the above is that there isn’t always a distinction made between translation and regional adaptation (the EN wiki is just as guilty of this as other language variants).

A github/PR/whatever based approach is not going to fix this dimension of the documentation problem without additional work. My current suspicion is that the EN version would have to cater for all regional oddities in one document, which currently doesn’t sound particularly realistic.

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Well, I encountered multiple reference works where hours were needed just to realize that documentation is misleading and incomplete AND there was no way to fix AND whoever operated it was ignoring error reports.

Maybe my standards are too low or I keep running into bad ones, but OSM Wiki is above average in my experience as far as documentation goes.

Still, if someone has an actually workable plan how to achieve better results it would be great to see an actual attempt.

I know that Imagico at least tried.

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There is a bit info at Wiki - OpenStreetMap Wiki - maybe it should be more prominent.

https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Wiki would be a good place to propose it (create a new section, ideally with specific proposal of what should be added where, maybe replacing something).

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I stand by my suggestion that it would be useful to have a banner at the top of every key / tag page. Maybe with slight variations in wording depending on tag status (de facto, in use, approved…)

@osmuser63783
What should the banner say exactly, e.g. for an in use tag?
And for a key with a mix of approved, in use and de facto values?
And for a key that is firmly established, but has several interpretations e.g. in different languages/countries/regions?

It’s not a banner, but I think the article for leisure=park does a somewhat adequate job of documenting the general way the tag is used globally while noting the regional differences in the United States. There’s no reason that couldn’t be summarized into a banner.

As far as the different status’ goes, that goes mainly comes down to clearly defining what they mean in the first place. It’s impossible to have a banner specifically for de facto values if what makes a tag “de facto” or not is totally undefined and depends on the personal preferences of whomever is editing the article at the time though.

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Tag status - OpenStreetMap Wiki attempts to give guidelines, if you have an idea for more rigorous ones not leading to even worse classification than now, proposing changes at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Wiki would be a good idea

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I might do that at some point when I have some free time. It looks like the talk page is pretty sparse on information and it would be good to know what proposals or discussions already took place before I try and reinvent the wheel or whatever. So do you know if there was any proposals or discussions about it before the current wording of the article was implemented and where I can find them if there were any?

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I have something like the following in mind.

Please let me know what you think!

For all tag and key pages:

The purpose of the OSM Wiki is to document how tags tend be used by mappers. It is a living resource and not meant to be treated as a final, fixed source of information.

For approved tags, add at the end:

The tag X has been discussed and approved by members of the community. While this means that it has survived a level of community vetting and scrutiny, it is not binding.

Please consult the community before making major edits to this page.

For in use tags:

The tag X is in use though its use may not be widespread. This page may contain errors, be outdated, or only describe how the tag is used in some regions of the world.

Please feel free to make changes to improve the documentation. When doing so, Please try to focus on how the tag is used, not on how you think it should be used.

For de facto tags add:

The tag X is in widespread use. Despite this, this page may contain errors, be outdated, or only describe how the tag is used in some regions of the world.

Please feel free to make changes to improve the documentation. When doing so, Please try to focus on how the tag is used, not on how you think it should be used. Please consult the community before making major edits.

Much of the wording is borrowed from the pages that have been linked in this thread. (The one about tag status and the one about the Wiki itself) I’m not married to any of it, in fact it probably should be improved and shortened by someone more experienced.

The goal is to inform beginners and remind regular users that the main purpose of the Wiki is documentation, to discourage people from telling others they’re “doing it all wrong”, to discourage undiscussed edits to pages for widely used tags. No offence but editing the Wiki page about the Wiki itself, or the page about tag status it not going to achieve any of that: whoever is reading that, is already way down the rabbit hole.

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I found Talk:Wiki - OpenStreetMap Wiki via Pages that link to "Tag status" - OpenStreetMap Wiki but I guess you are aware of it :slight_smile:

Though note that its should definitely be discussed at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Wiki (especially if it would be added to every single page)

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I don’t disagree. Although I was thinking more about changing the actual words for the various status’ to make it clearer what they actually mean instead of just editing the articles, which I agree probably won’t accomplish much. At least not with the vague terms for status’ we currently use. I also think it would be worth introducing a few new ones on top of it since there’s some blank spots with the current status’. Although clarifying things is never a bad thing either even if the potential effect is minimal.