[Imports] [Talk-us] GNIS tag removal proposal

[Paul Norman]

> From: Andrew Buck [mailto:andrew.r.buck at gmail.com]
> Sent: Wednesday, September 11, 2013 7:23 AM
> Subject: Re: [Imports] [Talk-us] GNIS tag removal proposal
> 
> The idea of doing a mass edit has been discussed but we decided against
> it (at least for now).  We don't want to bloat the history of millions
> of objects to with an edit just to remove the tags.  Putting them on the
> discard list means they slowly get worked out of the DB
> opportunistically when other 'normal' edits happen anyway.
> 
> Once the remaining numbers on a give tag get low enough then I think the
> plan is to do a 'mass edit' to wipe the remaining stragglers, but not
> until the numbers are sufficiently small that it won't bloat the DB.

I suspect we're going to want to run a number of mechanical edits on 
the GNIS data to clean it up, which to me is the biggest reason not to
do a mechanical edit solely to remove tags at this time.

At the same time, we know we can reduce the number of discardable tags 
by having them automatically dropped, and can be quite effective.

Once we have done fixup on the import we can take a look at if it's worth
it to go and remove the remaining discardable tags with a mechanical edit.

I'm not sure what the answer is, but I think it's premature to discuss
because many of the objects will of lost their discardable tags by then.