What do you do when people don’t respond (or stop responding)?

[Matija_Nalis]

Continuing the discussion from Changing RFC time for proposals including deprecation:

@Fizzie41

But what do you do when people don’t respond, or do but then stop?

well, firstly you fork a topic, like explained here

@Fizzie41

Do I now just raise a proposal to change that tag from “in use” to “approved” & also mark the others as deprecated, or just think, “I asked, but nobody answered or complained, so they must be happy with the idea, so I’ll just go ahead & do it”?

No; then you go with https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposal_process - suggesting what you intend to do, how you plan to handle existing relating tags, etc. as mentioned here.

Then you follow that Proposal process as outlined in the wiki. If nobody has any conflict nor had improvements, you proceed to Voting stage, and then, after Voting period passes, you count to votes, and only then change proposal status to “approved” or “rejected”. If it was “approved”, then you proceed to do thing exactly as you outlined you will do them in the proposal (so you’d better put some thought into Proposal initially, or you’ll be stuck midway implementation, and would have to abandon that proposal midway and start whole chore from the beginning).

@Fizzie41

Next step would be to go through the several 00 uses of the various tags worldwide & remove the duplicated tags that have been used on the same POI e.g. emergency=lifeboat_station + amenity=lifeboat_station.

If that is exactly what you proposed in your Proposal and it was Approved; then yes.

@Fizzie41

Some of them are also tagged as emergency_service=water, which doesn’t even have a page created, but is in use 250+ times!

That is also something you’ll need to propose how to handle in your Proposal.

@ZeLonewolf

If the topic is niche, then there is often not a need to go through a proposal at all - just document the usage under the principle of “any tags you like”.

Although, ATYL doesn’t work when your proposal intend to mess up with already existing tags. (it works fine if you’re just inventing new tag to describe something)

[ZeLonewolf (Brian M Sperlongano)]

Personally speaking, the most common reason that I don’t engage with a proposal is that the purpose and rationale are not clearly written, such that it’s hard to understand what the problem is, what the proposed solution is, and why the status quo is insufficient. In the past, I’ve commented on such proposals to point out that the proposal is not clear, and the response from the proposer is usually combative. After all, the proposer certainly believes their purpose and intent are clear.

I’m passionate about this topic because I’ve gotten five proposals approved, and I put significant effort into carefully describing the proposed change and why it fixes a real problem. So when I see proposals that seem to have been put together quickly and with not a lot of effort behind them to really dig in and research the problem and understand the different approaches and international interests, I don’t really feel a strong urge to jump in and help with the legwork unless it’s a topic I particularly care about.

Just to put my money where my mouth is, here’s a couple of examples of what I think a clearly-written proposal should look like:

• Simple case, with a deprecation: a proposal for the tagging of tailings ponds. Passed 32-0
• Difficult case, with a deprecation: a proposal to define and tag lakes, ponds, and reservoirs. Passed 54-0