Talk:Peter.doerrie/New Community Platform

My input towards such a platform:

I like the idea of a structured database. As the main advantage over a Wiki I see that ability to group and sort the information in various ways as needed without creating copies that need updating or become obsolete and contradicting.

I would also like to see the concept of Themes/Categories like "railways" or "accomodations" or "hiking" associated with all features in the DB so you can automatically create lists of all useful tags for a certain topic.

The description takes many elements from the current proposal process. From the mailing list discussions I conclude that a few things did not work very well and should be improved in such a platform. What I do not like is the term "Approved features": I think there is no such thing as an approved feature. The voting process for proposals is not accepted as meaningful and the results are not accepted as relevant.

I rather think that a feature should go through 3 stages:

• RFC: In this stage it is freshly proposed and the discussion about it is opened. It is not shown in the lists yet as it is likely to change during the first days/weeks of discussion.
• Proposed: The feature is shown in all lists/pages, but it is clearly marked as "proposed". People may experiment with it and see how it works, but should not expect it to be shown by renderers yet.
• Best practice/Recommended: Well established tags, shown in all lists/pages as recommended use. Corresponds to current map features.

There should not be a vote as this concept has not been accepted, but rather a usage count by different users to decide when a Proposed feature becomes recommended.

In the same way, a tag could be marked as "contested" in all lists, with a link to the reason. But it should be only marked as deprecated after a significant reduction in usage count, indicating that people understand why it is a bad idea.

I believe that one single recommendation for a purpose is always better than multiple, competing schemes. So a platform may support multiple schemes, but it should concentrate on bringing the people working on a topic together and achieve a consent for a common tagging scheme. It should not be designed to bring them apart by offering multiple synonyms for the same purpose as an easy way to avoid discussion and cooperation. This should only be the last resort if all else has failed. --Nop 10:57, 30 June 2009 (UTC)