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Comment by spb | Hacker News Reader

OpenStreetMaps' content is virtually 100% objective (with only political borders and names being potentially contentious).

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It's not 100% objective, but for simple things, it mostly is. If you hop on the mailing lists you will find all sorts of people bickering about whether it should be `shop=ice_cream` or `amenity=ice_cream` or `restauraunt=ice_cream` as they fight over their self-made taxonomies.

At some point, I think, things will inevitably change. But for the moment, there's so many obvious things to work on that the confusing/subjective things don't really pop up too much.

Do you have links? I'm interested in meta stuff.

Discussions about shop= vs amenity= are sometimes frustrating, but I bet they don't come anywhere near the discussions over using –,—, or - in page titles.

Here's 15,000 words. At the end of that? No consensus. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(poli...

The type of dash to use in "Mexican-American War" got over 20,000 words. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Mexican%E2%80%93American_...

Dash wars even got to Arbcom: https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitra...

Political contention isn't as big a problem, as spam and inaccuracy. Those are the problems that make such sites generally unwelcoming towards newcomers. Both Wikipedia and Google Maps demonstrate this. OSM doesn't.

What's there to argue about over names? Pardon my ignorance, I'm very poorly-travelled.

For instance, do you refer to a particular group of uninhabited islands as "Senkaku Islands, Japan", "Diaoyu Islands, People's Republic of China", or "Diaoyutai Islands, Republic of China"? Some people are very passionate about the answer.

Is the political entity on Formosa "Taiwan", "Taiwan Province, Republic of China", "Taiwan Province, People's Republic of China", or "Taiwan, Province of China"?

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