[Talk-us] name expansion bot (Re: Imports information on the wiki)

[Alan Mintz]

At 2012-01-15 05:35, Mike N wrote:
>On 1/15/2012 8:28 AM, Nathan Edgars II wrote:
>>Actually the script also expanded the W to West. But my point is that it
>>is a TIGER entry error, and any future script needs to take into account
>>that these exist and people may have already fixed them to the correct
>>names.
>
>  Agreed- if we're thinking of a bot that periodically fixes everything, 
> we need a special tag that says "abbreviation_bot=back_off" (but perhaps 
> not so verbose) - something that tells the bot not to touch the name 
> because it is unusual and has been manually checked.

I hope there is no such bot being contemplated again. The last one created 
lots of issues. In any case, a tag shouldn't be necessary - if the name has 
been edited by a human, it should not be updated by a bot, or even another 
human unless they are willing to prove their edit. I've edited thousands of 
names based on photo surveys and official record research and wouldn't want 
that high-quality data corrupted.

My experience is that TIGER is generally of poor quality with regard to 
names, and is actually getting worse. I routinely see streets that are made 
up of multiple segments where the spelling or suffix is not consistent 
among them. Some of these were even correct in the original TIGER05 import, 
and were corrupted since by a TIGER editor!

--
Alan Mintz <Alan_Mintz+OSM at Earthlink.net>