[OSM-newbies] Splitting ways and retaining history

[Renaud MICHEL]

On jeudi 29 septembre 2011 at 16:35, Bob Hawkins wrote :
> I fear I might have been overlooking something when editing in JOSM: I
> have been splitting ways in order to facilitate the addition of
> particular parts to a relation.  I discovered yesterday that one part
> loses its history to be replaced by a new version 1 only that is my own
> edit.  Surely this cannot be correct?

It is correct, if you split a way you end up with two independents objects, 
only one of them can keep the same ID, so the other will be a new object.

> I appreciate that a new id has to
> be created for one section, but it seems wrong that all previous
> evidence of who created the way in the first place is lost, and that it
> seems I am the person responsible.  Is there another practice that
> should be adopted?

If you care about this, you can add on the newly created way a tag like
created_from=<id of original way>
I don't know if there is such a tag (maybe with another name or semantic) in 
use, but if there is I don't think it is widely used.

To be successful, such a tagging practice would have to be handled 
automatically by the editors.

-- 
Renaud Michel