In recent months I’d had the displeasure of proposing new ways of describing (“tagging”) features in OpenStreetMap. I’ve been trying to expand and improve the tags for environmental features as part of a project I’m working on. Now I’d like to provoke a bit of debate about the use of “subtags” – tags that qualify others, for example saying “this is a garden, and it’s the sort of garden that it used for allotments” rather than saying more simply “these are allotments”. The wiki-based process to agree new tags is a poor excuse for democracy. Under the noses of the hundreds of thousands of OpenStreetMap contributors who refer to the map features page, a relatively small number of people are rolling up their sleeves and debating major changes to the tagging schema on mailing lists and the wiki. Up to twenty or thirty people vote on any proposal, with no…