[josm-dev] Another 66 relations bite the dust

[Richard Fairhurst]

Someone seems to have decided to answer the question about "how should 
we tag the National Byway" by deleting it. :(

In http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/changeset/4653538 , a vast number 
of relations have been deleted - 66 or so. Among these are a bunch of 
cycle routes - the National Byway (id 9327, previously with 893 relation 
members), NCN route 74, the Caledonian Cycleway - plus some railway 
routes and the usual NAPTaN gubbins. I restored the National Byway 
before noticing the rest of them; now, I guess, it would be helpful to 
rollback the rest of the changeset.

The user has done lots of really good edits so I'm 100% sure that this 
isn't vandalism.

The created_by is JOSM 1.5 (3094 en). This roughly echoes:
   http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/josm-dev/2010-March/004228.html
   http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/josm-dev/2010-April/004276.html

although, in this case, the relations have been deleted rather than 
'blanked'. I think all of the relations in question passed through

As per the first cited message, I don't want to get into an editor 
argument here, but I do know from bitter experience that if Potlatch let 
you do this without realising, there would have been people screaming 
for my head for months now.

Deleting a relation with 900ish members is almost always going to be an 
error. Obviously we don't yet know what's happened here, but I think we 
can safely assume that the user wasn't presented with a dialogue reading 
"Are you really really sure you want to delete an entire chuffing cycle 
route along 900 roads?" and a button "HELL YES!".

Could I entreat the JOSM developers to put some serious effort into 
identifying and fixing this at the very earliest opportunity?

cheers
Richard