Proposal talk:Via ferrata simplified

Old vs New proposal

The old proposal has a way to use relations (added just a few days ago) which would have helped a lot (I hope) to reconcile the irreconcilable parties - everyone could have mapped the way he prefers while the existing tags such as via_ferrata an via_ferrata_scale would be still rendered in the mapping apps.

Afaics this new proposal does completely give in to the opponents of the "old" proposal who categorically oppose using anything but highway=path but you are completely ignoring the tags those opponents have long established for their use and instead introducing a third set of tags. RicoZ (talk) 13:15, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

Correct. I simplified and kept it simple (shortened the tags to use the abbrev for via ferrata VF like we use the SAC-abbrev in sac_scale). I honestly did not look a lot into the arguments about adding a new type of highway. As stated in the proposal I believe we already have base tags that cover humans traveling along a path (be it strenuous alpine hiking or strolling on a broad path with a child in hand) and build on top of that. What we need is tags to tag ferrous ways and perhaps also this more elaborate difficulty scale. I look forward to see the community response to this and send thanks to everyone who contributed ideas to the former proposals since 2010.--PangoSE (talk) 18:21, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

I believe that given the limited number of real world ferratas we should not afford two, much less three competing proposals. The "old" proposal has a reasonable acceptance of mappers and tools/rendering. Consider the usage of highway=via_ferrata + via_ferrata_scale.

There is a long history of discussions, also in mailing lists (some on the Austrian list) and a substantial part of mappers oppose the "old" proposal for various reasons. Historically, rendering and "this ferrata is easier than unsecured mountain path X - why should the second be rendered and not he first one" seem to be major issues. Other issues are the slight over-verbosity of the "old" proposal - via_ferrata_scale vs ferrata_scale. The "alternative" mapping is (very simplified) highway=path+via_ferrate_scale or alternatively path+ferrata=yes or path+ferrata_scale or any combination of thereof. Imho any new proposal should try to reuse as many as possible tags that are in (somewhat) in use. My estimate is that a simple majority would favor the "old" proposal but not enough to risk a vote that requires a 2/3 majority. Also.. this is fairly specialized stuff and some interested parties are somewhat skeptical if voting by JoeXXX would bring much enlightenment. Similar for the climbing proposal that was mentioned.

While some people are very dogmatic about it, most just want any compromise possible. During the last discussion in the Austrian ml the possibility of relation=route, route=ferrata was suggested which I like and believe this is a good way to bring both (old) approaches closer together.

Another idea occurred to me just today when reading the highway=path and original highway=path proposal. The ancient highway=path proposal talks about *=designated tags and just as that a ferrata=designated tag could be used and applied to all elements along the route. "access=designated" being a common access-tag value would help to reduce misunderstandings by routers. This would also somewhat justify the use of ferrata=yes by some "alternative" mappers for really simple ferratas, though not for the very difficult ones. The original argument against ferrata=yes was that it is a troll tag - a tag turning the meaning of a well established tag into something with a substantially different meaning. This would be much more true for vf=yes.. a completely unintelligible tag.

We should not ignore that some ferratas are quite difficult - they would constitute very difficult climbing routes. Hence highway=path can not fit them all - so no matter what some people say highway=path with whatever additional attributes is not the ideal way to tag an extremely difficult climbing route that happens to be secured by a cable or similar.

I do not think the both disagreeing parties will agree completely anytime soon but I believe an incrementally improved, well structured proposal can enable a huge majority mappers to map the way they like without causing major disruptions to data users. Eventually taginfo will resolve the dispute. Thus far.. an extreme climbing route should not be tagged as highway=path. RicoZ (talk) 19:51, 3 September 2018 (UTC)

Thank you for taking the time to explain. I still see no problem with tagging an extreme climbing route as highway=path. The OSM database is a vector database describing the world as it is from reasonly well defined tags and values agreed upon and all arguments about how to render and or prepare yourself IRL to follow the routes are non of my business as a mapper.

If people use OSM rendered badly and go out with their heads under their arms and die/strand on a reasonable tagged mountainous path or die in traffic because they followed OSM rendered by a faulty app this is none of our business. OSMF already warns people not to solely use OSM to navigate. Given this, any tag-proposal that takes us out of status quo is good enough to me. If ditching "bad" tags already in use is necessary this is OK to me. There are still below 2000 objects currently tagged with some of the above and with 5000 edits per day it would not take long to correct these to an approved tagging scheme given a few dedicated mappers.

If you are afraid you proposal is not going to pass I say: try send it to voting and see what happens. Then make a new and improved proposal until the community is satisfied and approves. A slightly sub optimal approved proposal is in my view better than wild wild west tags never voted or agreed on that is used widely but in an inconsistent way. Maybe both these proposals will fail for different reasons and we make one or two new ones.--PangoSE (talk) 09:37, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

I don't see any reason why it should be tagged as highway=path or any kind of highway btw. For some reason the old proposal endorsed highway=via_ferrata and it is reasonably widely used so I don't deprecate it anytime soon. Some ferratas are sheer rock with a cable. Where is the highway? The climbing proposal would map those as climbing=route, is anything wrong with this? But I recognize that there are also really easy ferratas that are "walkable" and for those highway=path may be appropriate.

It is not my proposal, it is one of the many that I picked up some time ago and try to improve and document real world practices. Several of the involved mappers are highly skeptical about the formal proposal and voting process and map whatever they like the way they like. Will not attempt any voting before there is more consensus about the issues. As explained earlier I believe taginfo will mark the winner eventually - and this has the huge advantage that only active mappers "vote". Who else should decide this?

Even if you would by some miracle get your draft formally accepted nobody would ever drop their favorite tagging in favor of something like "vf=yes", much less would data consumers magically start supporting it just because it is approved. RicoZ (talk) 10:33, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for the reply. I base the vf=yes and vf_scale=* abbreviation on the same rationale that brought sac_scale and that tag seem to work well all over the world. If I say UN, can you guess what it stands for? People who cant guess what VF and do not look it up in the wiki is is probably using iD and there you can have it shown as "Via Ferrata (Scale)" or something similar.

Regarding the fear of adoption of vf=yes I trust the community to suggest a better alternative and/or follow its own decissions in the long run. As a note aside it seems ferrata=* and via_ferrata_scale=* has until now only cought on in Europe aside from a few stray dots according to taginfo and the use i really marginal (1/100th as used compared to sac_scale).--PangoSE (talk) 11:23, 6 September 2018 (UTC)

Iirc it has been mentioned in the mailing lists that sac_scale was a really poor choice to do it and it should have been done differently. Anyway, if you trust community to suggest something better why are you suggesting anything at all? Why don't you start a discussion on the mailing lists asking for suggestions? Why don't you bother to read old but relevant mailing list discussions?

Also, I think you underestimate the difficulties of a worldwide project where many participants don't speak English or very poorly and other have strong local groups. When I was trying to clean up the "location" tag I found out it was used to mark the place of bus stops in Hong Kong. When I was cleaning up "layer" I found it was used to map street surface quality or whatever else in Indonesia and space stations in outer space. 90% of mappers doing climbing and via ferratas are Italian, French, German/Austrian, Spanish and Russian. Most of those discuss their mapping practice in local groups and some are hard to reach and not at all interested in the proposal/RFC/voting circus. I know there are routes that could be described as via_ferrata in Asia but we are lucky if someone translates a few pages into Chinese and Japanese, we can not expect from those few translating wiki pages to also translate or participate in exotic proposals. I do know a few European languages and try to reach out to many mappers with limited English capabilities but have no way to reach eg Chinese or Japanese mappers. RicoZ (talk) 13:13, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

There are quite a many OSM-based hiking maps in the field which do not follow tagging scheme updates frequently. I would be highly concerned if those maps would render via ferratas just as regular hiking trails, in the lack of interpreting newly introduced extension tags. Such rendering issues would question the credibility of the entire map. Most via ferratas require ferrata kits and special skills, and they are impassable by regular hikers, hence they definitely need to be discriminated from regular hiking trails by map renderers. I don't think that hikers are interested in OSM-internal tagging debates, they are only interested what is at the end of the pipe, i.e. how such changes impact OSM-based hiking maps, including legacy ones (old Garmin outputs etc). --Gmatefi (talk) 22:01, 12 September 2018 (UTC)

Deprecation question on Tagging

"Why would you want to use route=hiking for ferrata if you can use 
route=ferrata? Do you want to deprecate via_ferrata_scale as well?" 

Asked by RicoZ.

Yes updated Proposed_features/Via_ferrata_simplified#Deprecates--PangoSE (talk) 09:45, 4 September 2018 (UTC)

Removal of vandalism

Today I removed what I regard vandalism on the proposal page by RicoZ. The edits can be viewed in the history and was not discussed here first. Please discuss here if you have constructive suggestions to contribute to this proposal.--PangoSE (talk) 06:17, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

Link to the edit that you consider vandalism. RicoZ (talk) 11:22, 7 September 2018 (UTC)

Seasonal Access

Added section for seasonal access tagging Arminus (talk) 11:33, 16 Oct 2018 (UTC)

Thanks for you contribution :)--PangoSE (talk) 11:46, 5 March 2019 (UTC)

Redefining highway=path ?

You can not redefine it as it is an approved feature and many tools and data consumers rely on the correct definition. Saying "In this proposal highway=path is interpreted broadly as: a path along which a human with some degree of preparation can travel." might not directly contradict the approved definition but if it is applied as intended for via ferratas of all difficulty levels that would probably contradict common sense expectation you get from the description provided in highway=path and Approved_features/Path. RicoZ (talk) 21:26, 8 March 2019 (UTC)