[Imports] imports distorting usage stats of source:maxspeed tag

[Martin Koppenhoefer]

2014-03-23 21:48 GMT+01:00 Richard Welty <rwelty at averillpark.net>:

> i think it's worth pointing out that NE2's use of source:maxspeed
> was not controversial and had nothing to do with his departure.
>



+1 that it wasn't the reason that he left and it wasn't discussed with him
at the time, but yet it was controversial (and is still) as you can see
from this thread. You might have a different idea about it, but IMHO osm
tags are describing objects and functions, they should not (and are
generally not) metadata describing the data itself instead of the object.
Yes, I could put a tag on every edit saying insertion_date=2014-03-21 or
"last-time-modified=2014-03-21", but if I did people would object (I
think). In which way is "source" different? And why would the key for the
source of a maxspeed be "source:maxspeed" and not e.g. "maxspeed:source"?
It is mostly arbitrary, so why bother to redefine a well introduced tag
instead of making up a new one?

IMHO if you map something and you make up a new tag it should be really
_new_ and not a tag that others use for a different purpose (or you will
surely get problems sooner or later). When we started to use
source:maxspeed in 2009 there were 0 occurences of this (there were also 0
occurences of maxspeed:source, which btw. I would have preferred
personally, but some prolific local mapper preferred source:maxspeed by the
time and I didn't mind as none of both was in use then).

Anyway, if you do normal mapping you can do whatever you like, but if you
perform an import you should not distort the stats by using tags in an
unconventional way. E.g. the values
EMUiA␣UM␣Ostrołęka<http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/tags/source%3Amaxspeed=EMUiA%20UM%20Ostro%C5%82%C4%99ka>and
Stats19 seem to have been imported (or manually introduced by manual
imports) in the past year.
One example for the Stats19 is this here:
http://www.openstreetmap.org/changeset/17880000 (which doesn't look like an
automatic import admittedly).

cheers,
Martin
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