Silliest tagging disputes
Occasionally, even experienced OSMers lose their heads and devote every waking moment to edit warring over the most trivial thing, wasting time debating tagging topics of no practical value, or wrestling over questions whose answers hold no practical consequence. This page documents our silliest examples. It isn't comprehensive or authoritative, but it serves as a showcase of situations where people lose sight of the big picture and obsessively expend huge amounts of energy fighting over something that, in the end, isn't really so important.[1]
highway=driveway2
A Singapore-based mapper applied the ATYL principle to create a tag for service roads that connected other types of service roads, and named this tag service=driveway2, using it widely in Singapore and Japan. A member of the Data Working Group described the tag as "silly" in a wiki discussion, which prompted a US-based mapper to bulk-remove the tag from the database. The DWG member ordered the US mapper to restore the tags so the community could discuss it. A second US-based mapper duly started a talk mailing list thread which devolved into a discussion of whether the tag should be removed mechanically or if each tag should be inspected manually. Once the mailing list discussion ended without conclusion, the driveway2 mapper continued adding it to the database for nine months. The first US-based mapper eventually noticed this and necroposted to the nine-month-old mailing list thread lamenting that the tag continued to proliferate. This eventually led to the first US mapper starting a community forum thread proposing to remove the tag which subsequently became the community forum's top thread of all time.