[Imports] Fixing large number of mistagged buildings near Boulder Colorado, US

[Paul Norman]

On 9/7/2015 9:49 PM, Chris Riddoch wrote:
> I would also have already written an automated edit script, but I saw
> in numerous places of the wiki, as well as being told indirectly on
> IRC, that I should really be talking to someone about this sort of
> thing first.  I looked through what documentation there is about the
> 'osmchange' format on the wiki, but it wasn't clear how to handle
> changes to tags from the description there.
>
> So I ran josm with -Djavax.net.debug=all so that I could analyze the
> format properly.  It looks like it isn't *quite* as simple as just
> providing a file you can just send to the server, because that
> incorporates a changeset ID which is ephemeral.  I also wouldn't want
> to try such a thing without properly testing it first.  So I knew I'd
> need to talk to someone here about how best to do this -- thus, my
> original message.  I came here because I read those wiki pages.
Generating the diff yourself and uploading is the wrong way to make a 
change like this. The normal way to deal with a change like this is with 
JOSM and JOSM's find command, perhaps combined with the overpass API. I 
should mention that overpass API and "select all" is not the right way 
to make a change either.

There are exceptions to this rule, such as a mechanical fix of TIGER 
street names from about a year or two ago, which was both large and complex.

> Yes, it's *possible* to fix errors by hand individually using JOSM, in
> the same way it's possible to count grains of rice by hand, but... no,
> I'm sorry, I'm just not motivated to do that.
>
> It sounds like the most useful thing I could do, though, would be to
> help you all develop a mechanism for reverting changesets.  That seems
> a rather important feature for crowdsourced data management.  Should I
> be
> looking at https://github.com/openstreetmap/openstreetmap-website for that?
Openstreetmap-website is for the web page and API, and revert tools 
wouldn't be part of either. They interact with the API like other 
editors. JOSM has a revert plugin, and there are also command-line tools 
which are difficult to use. Improvements to either of them would of 
course be welcome.

A revert isn't what you want anyways, if they were mapped with the wrong 
building value from the start, as reverting the changeset would remove 
them all.