Documenting the history of OpenStreetMap

It might be good to add it. I’m not sure where in the process it should be though. If the original person who wants the article deleted contacts the original creator of it and then moves it before there’s a discussion it might piss people off. But then if its at the end where the two possible options are moving or deleted then people might always favor moving over deleting. Even if its not the best option. So where it should be in the draft is up to you I guess.

As opposed to what? I’m not really sure what you mean. If your talking about if to discuss the deletion request on the drafts talk page or somewhere else, the draft is best (compared to say a mailing list).

If your asking who should put the {{deletion proposal}} up, the original person or the contesting them, id say the person contesting them, because they should have to say why they are contesting it on the discussion page. Whereas the person requesting the deletion already should be justifying it in the deletion request (so if they started the proposal discussion it would just be redundant). Also, it seems like a more natural path for the person doing the contesting.

I.E. 1. revert → 2. place {{delete proposal}} → 3. give rational.

Compared to 1. place deletion request → 2. receive email about being reverted → 3. login → 4. Place deletion proposal → 5. remember what your justification was and how to dispute the short revert comment → 6. Post discussion message.

Its the difference between 3 steps versus 6. Neither the person making the deletion request or the person disputing should have to jump through a bunch of hoops to it, but its clearly easier on the disputing persons side. So I think it should be on them.

Plus it stops people from 1. reverting and calling it a day 2. reverting and deciding to harass the deletion proposer on their talk page before they can start a discussion on the page of the actual article 3. The person doing the reverting talking the conversation to somewhere else inappropriate like the mailing list. All of which currently happens.

Please have a look at https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/User_talk:Tigerfell/Crafting#%22In_case_that_a_deletion_is_opposed%22.

I suggested this path, because it is shorter and you do not need to revert anything if the page was not emptied when requesting deletion (simply place “proposal” after "{{delete ". I think there were too many reverts causing aggression and anger, so I wanted to remove this step.

Exactly!

If the editor who originally created the proposal has retired from everything OSM, most likely they wouldn’t care if we moved their proposals to their userspaces. They were the creators of them anyway.

If the editor is still active on OSM and the OSM Wiki and still hasn’t replied then we should probably go along with the deletion process, especially if the proposal was created by accident or has no informative content.

Maybe in that case we should create a voting system where users vote to “keep” or “delete” on the talk pages, through or not through RFC. With the more contentious ones anyway. The ones that have no informative content should probably be replaced with {{delete}} without discussion & the admins can decide themselves whether to delete them or not.

As I said, changing a user sub page is some sort of problem…

Why not using a section of the talk page and the usual templates for feature voting…

Whatever is discussed here it seems almost everyone lost interest in this thread so it will be at best the consensus of 2.5 people (pun intended) and I stopped wasting my time.

Either we agree in the wiki or it will go the normal proposal route with RFC call on ml and voting.

Its clear no one was interested in this in first. Including the the couple of people doing the reverting. Since they where obviously making a much bigger deal out of it then it is. The whole reason this discussion is happening is to satisfy those people. So the thing was a waste of all our times in the first place. Since they could have just shoved off to start with instead of reverting me repeatedly because of some stupid personal problem or something. But that didn’t happen. So here we are. Going by the lack of response here and everywhere else though this is essentially a none issue and most of the pages should have just been deleted originally, but its still worth having guidelines despite that, just to keep them from doing this type of thing again if nothing else (and there’s no other good reason I can think of).

Not that it is the consensus of 2.5 people, but so what if it was? plenty of more important decisions having to do with OSM are made by less consensus. At least in this case we did our due diligence to allow people to provide feedback. Which is more then usually happens. If those people decided not to provide feedback though, that’s on them. We aren’t going to say screw the whole thing because other people decided to stay silent about it though.

Are you talking about the guideline proposal or when it comes to certain pages being deleted? If its about the guideline proposal its obviously still being worked on and discussed. As I said above, its on whoever doesn’t participate if they decide not to, not us. Things take time on here sometimes though. That’s life. The 2.5 people that are involved have provided pretty good feedback though that the proposal has been refined based on. So I’m not sure what your complaining about.

If your talking about deletion proposals, its clearly the consensus here that doing an RFC on the mailing list every time someone wants to request a page be deleted is unrealistic, a waste of the mailing lists time, and just not the right medium for it. There’s a good chance that people on the mailing list will just agree with whatever and not actually go over the page. Which is completely understandable. There’s no reason their time should be wasted reviewing a blank page or “bad” page every time someone does a deletion request. Plus, the person doing the deletion request shouldn’t have to manage a discussion about it in multiple mediums. Its hard enough with one. Also, know one really cared or contributed to the discussion when it was brought up in the mailing list. There’s no reason it would be any different, because ultimately this is a completely manufactured none issue, created by a few people that don’t really care about it in the first place.

Either way though, things within the wiki should be dealt with within the wiki. If things can’t be resolved there, then that’s on the wiki and its lack of a good civil community. In cases where consensus or a compromise can’t be reached, the pages should just be deleted in my opinion. In cases where its just a blank or “bad” page getting the deletion request though, which is 99% of the time, I don’t think consensus or a discussion should be used in the first place and the pages should just be deleted. Which I think the 2.5 people here all agree on. So it probably won’t be an issue most of the time anyway.

Its important to remember that not only are we discussing an extremely small percent of proposals out there, the ones out of the deletion requests that might qualify for or merit a dispute conversation is even more tiny. Unless people disregard things by reverting everything, including blank pages. Then they should just be reported to an admin. Before this gets finalized though we should be clear on what deletions requests should be contestable and which shouldn’t.

I am against deleting any proposed features and prefer to keep all of them as an archive. In cases where there is a good tagging for this kind of feature I would create banner at top of proposal template. The exceptions are pages that would fit generally deletion as being essentially blank, created as vandalism etc.

Though I am really dubious on discussing it here - not on OSM wiki where it can be followed and watchlisted or on talk mailing list where it would have larger audience.

Discussing it here combines poor ability to follow discussion and small audience.

I agree with Mateusz, generally we should keep all proposals, with the exception of empty pages and vandalism (and possibly with those pages that the original author wants deleted, and which haven’t had contributions by anyone else, including their “talk” page).
Btw., you can “watch” this forum thread as well, and get notices when new answers are posted

As I already said, you can alternatively discuss that at the draft’s talk page. Current strategy is to formulate a draft which will be posted on the mailing list.

I still do not understand why you want to keep a proposal like https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Talk:Proposed_features/Xian (which Mateusz Konieczny and I recently discussed about). There is zero use, it is effectively an abandoned draft that is almost identical to the tag is_in=Xian and it does not follow the guideline “Do not map you local legislation, if not bound to objects in reality”. We are mostly talking about proposals like this.

Can you please name a reason why this would be worth keeping?

there is a key, a value and a definition. And a suggestion on the talk page why it is not a good tag according to the mapper. And this for a tag that is only useful in a country where mapping is prohibited by law.
I would be interested to know why we should delete it. It will probably not be found by anyone else but people looking for a tag for Xian, and they at least will get some guidance from the talk page.

Please elaborate this. I do not understand the relation between using this tag and prohibition of mapping in mainland China.

Basically, you need a key, value, and a definition and then it is worth keeping?

I would say a key is sufficient, plus desirably a definition.

What I wanted to say is that we can not expect the same amount of contributions from countries where mapping is legally prohibited than from other areas. It is natural that such tags that refer to places where mapping is not allowed, are expanding slower than other tags. And it means that it will probably not get in the way of other mappers, because they will not search for the term.

You still should explain why you believe it would be better to delete this rather than keeping it.

And additionally, to focus the documentation of the wiki on currently relevant content and avoid duplication.

Ok, then let us say I hereby propose feature a=b.
This is worth storing permanently in the wiki even though just I know its meaning, right?

IMHO we have to distinguish. When it comes to focussing the documentation, this should be seen as focussing the linked / structured documentation. Isolated wikipages with few content do not distract anybody. You will not see them (if you do not explicitly look for them). Of course I would not link the xian proposal from a map features page or something like that, nor would I link it from as “see also” or similar, and I would oppose to do so.

I agree every instance can be discussed individually. A proposal like that might eventually also fall into the “vandalism” case.

Is there any chance we can formulate more general rules? Discussing in a case-by-case basis has led to edit warring in the past (this is the whole reason we discuss this actually).

Well, I wrote a proposed key is probably sufficient (because not always you will need to propose value in order to make sense), plus desirably a description, and you replied you’re going to propose a=b. Obviously in this case, it doesn’t make sense, because neither “a” nor “b” do provide any kind of context. This is different from almost all keys or k/v that are proposed, which do provide some inherent meaning (although it may not always be clear what is the intended interpretation, e.g. amenity=school has been read as “any kind of general school”, but also as “any kind of institution where you may learn something”, that is why a definition is also desirable).
Now, not every definition makes equally sense, some are written so poorly that they either include more than what they wanted or less than what was intended. It is not possible to cater for every kind of constellation (like a=b) with universal rules about deletions. Generally, I am with Mateusz, we should not delete any proposal, with some very few exceptions (vandalism, void pages, …, where it could be seen as “not a proposal anyway”, although posted in the wiki proposal namespace).