[Tagging] Dispute concerning shrimp pond dikes

[Serge Wroclawski]

On Sat, Jan 19, 2013 at 10:43 AM, doug brown <dougcb68 at hotmail.com> wrote:
> In the past couple of years I have spent several tens of hours digitizing
> the shrimp pond dikes in San Blas Municipio, Nayarit, Mexico.  They are a
> significant feature on the local landscape and of importance because of the
> degradation they are causing in the mangrove forest ecosystems in which they
> are located.
>
> I was much dismayed this past summer when all of these features were deleted
> from the OSM data base (changeset 11807195), with the comment "Deleting
> vandalism, those are not roads".
>
> The tags I used on these features are as follows:
>
> access = private
> embankment = yes
> highway = unclassified
> man_made = dike
> name = shrimp pond dike
>
> My reasoning being that all of the dikes have, at a minimum, a footpath on
> top of them, with most having a motor vehicle accessible road.  While they
> are all private roads, most of them are open to public access and I
> frequently ride my bicycle on them.
>
Doug,

As others have said, some of the tags you used to make these edits
were a bit "off".

First, highway=unclassified probably doesn't mean what you assumed it
means. It does not mean "I do not know the classification of this
road". Unclassified roads are roads which do not have a
classification, or have a classification of "unknown". They are
drivable roads.

The value of highway where you do not know its classification is
"road". That is very confusing, but you can blame our British friends,
who have "unclassified" as a classification in their official road
system, which OSM borrows from.

Others have given you examples of highway classifications you can use instead.

But the real trouble may have been, "name=shrimp pond dyke". "name" is
the name of the object. In the example or a road, it's the name of the
road. In the example of a restaurant, it's the name of the restaurant.

The result of the two would be that someone looking at the area you
made would see lots of roads all named "shrimp pond dyke". If the
embankment roads have no name, that's better than them all being named
the same.

Usually when someone sees lots of the sane feature, it's either
vandalism or a newbie making errors that look like vandalism, and the
person simply took the steps to remove what looked obviously wrong.

What he should have done is, as you did, reach out to you and discuss
these edits.

So what's to be done now?

My suggestion is that you use Josm (if you are using potlatch, there
will be a bit of a learning curve), to open up that changeset and
revert it, but you'll want to clean up the embankments, and possibly
make a new tag for the ponds themselves, such as waterway=shrimp_pond
or something else that can be used to identify the water feature.

- Serge