User talk:Peter Mead

Street relation for addresses

Hello Peter, perhaps we can achieve a compromise regarding the "Adresses" page. Could you explain why you consider the street relation "approved and established"? I'm not aware that there ever was a proposal vote about the relation, and it is rarer than even the associated_street relation (which itself is rarer than addr:street by an order of magnitude). "How to map" should explain current practice, and as far as I can tell, the street relation isn't part of that. --Tordanik 13:14, 30 July 2015 (UTC)

Hi Tordanik. In my opinion the "How to map addresses" section of Addresses page should contain high level details of how addresses can be represented in OSM with the individual pages such as addr:street=* having more detail. The associatedStreet and street relations were under-represented in that high level view. Whether either of those relations should be used can be discussed and detailed in the individual pages. While our opionions of the relations differ I don't think we should stop other users from easily finding the pages and forming their own conclusions.

As an aside, the interpolation seems to only be detailed on this page. To get a cleaner high level view, and make the page less cluttered, it would be good to move that to a separate page.

As for the street relation I think it is one of the many pages on the wiki where it is too late to ask for approval. It's four years old and is currently in use. I have not been on the wiki for as long as you so I don't know if there was a vote at the time, I certainly can't see one. But I can't see a vote for the proposed Karlsruhe Schema or the addr:street=* tag either. --Peter Mead (talk) 14:09, 30 July 2015 (UTC)

So as far as we can tell, the street relation is not approved, and given the (comparatively) low usage numbers and lack of software support, it is clearly not established either. While the Karlsruhe tagging has never be voted on either, and is thus not approved, it is definitely established.

From your response, it seems that we have somewhat different ideas about the intention of the page. In my opinion, it is more useful for the average mapper to describe the dominant tagging schemes first and foremost. It shouldn't be necessary to research the various proposals and alternatives to learn about address tagging. Of course, such alternative schemes should still be visible for those interested, just not presented in such a way that they seem on equal footing with the dominant ones when they are really not.

Therefore, I'm proposing a compromise as follows: The street relation (and other new ideas such as AddrN) will be described with text on the Addresses page, but in a "Proposed additions" (or similarly named) section below the "how to map" section. That way, it is easily visible which parts represent the status quo and which are the new ideas, and users can form their own conclusions. --Tordanik 10:00, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

I agree in principal to what you suggest but I'm not sure it will work in practice. Firstly what would the section be called? We can't use "Proposed additions" for the street relation because it's not a proposed in the usual sense. We can't call it "new additions" because it's certainly not new.

We can't pigeon hole things into either status quo or new ideas. There are also old, and established, ideas like address interpolation which have fallen out of favour.

If the purpose of the page is to describe the dominant tagging schemes to the average mapper then surely the first part of "How to map addresses" (before any of the sections) is all you need. addr:housenumber=* and/or addr:housename=* are the dominant tags. The "Buildings with multiple house numbers" section is a great example of the competing and conflicting ideas and the lack of consensus. --Peter Mead (talk) 15:01, 4 August 2015 (UTC)