[Tagging] Recreation_ground (landuse vs leisure)

GregTroxel GregTroxel
Mon May 27 11:29:38 UTC 2013


Tobias Knerr <osm at tobias-knerr.de> writes:

> On 27.05.2013 00:47, Greg Troxel wrote:
>> 
>> Hannes <hannes.janetzek at googlemail.com> writes:
>>> Sorry, I was not aware of that policy. I will discuss such edits in future.
>>> Please revert if they are unreasonable
>> 
>> You should revert them yourself.  If you aren't comfortable doing
>> reverts, you should not be running a bot.
>
> I disagree - he should not revert his previous edits which were genuine
> improvements. If anything at all, he could revert this particular edit
> of *=recreation_ground ways. But if you actually believe that it was
> wrong, you could just as well do it yourself - it will be dealt with
> faster that way.

I meant only to comment on the {leisure/landuse}=recreation_ground issue.

> I also want to point out that Hannes is not "running a bot". He is,
> apparently, simply using JOSM.

I looked at the changeset and it had a bounding box that was
approximately global.  Sorry for jumping to conclusion of "bot", but
this also doesn't seem to be "I looked at each item and thought about
it".  Loading lots of data in josm and using a plugin to change many
things at once is not so different than a bot.

>> Fixing typos is one thing,
>> but your leisure->landuse changes are not in the category of "99.5% of
>> mappers think that they are obviously correct fixes".
>
> In the case of recreation_ground, I agree that the number of uses of
> leisure=recreation_ground should have tipped him off that this might not
> be an uncontroversial edit.

leisure=recreation_ground is 1.4% of all leisure tags, with 24,011 uses,
That's not only nowhere near fringe, it makes the first page of taginfo!

  http://taginfo.openstreetmap.org/keys/leisure#values

I think it used to be documented, but the wiki doesn't show it now.  I
don't know if that's because it never was documented, or because the
documentation has been wikifiddled out of existence.  I don't mean to
suggest anything in particular about this case, but I have perceived
attempts to change things in the past by first changing the wiki and
then claiming it's ok to change tags because of what the wiki says.
Done publically with discussion, that's progress of course.

landuse=recreation_ground on the other hand, I can't find in taginfo.

There really are multiple different kinds of places (overgeneralizing a
bit, I know)

  1) park: landscaped, not natural, but has grass

  2) conservation with human hiking/etc. welcome

  3) conservation with human activity not welcome

I use leisure=nature_reserve for 3 and leisure=recreation_ground for 2.
The point about 2 is that for many areas, they are legally designated
conservation, and some commission can decide whether to allow
hiking/cycling/ATVs/snowmobiles/horses etc. just by making rules.  But
to do anything other than "conservation" requires (in my state) a vote
of the commission, the entire voters of the town, and an Act of the
legislature, more or less.   So it's totally fair to say
landuse=conservation because that's the primary purpose.

> But with the other changes, things are different. I believe that
> changing a handful instances of an undocumented tag to an obviously
> synonymous tag that *is* documented and much more widely used (e.g.
> 1000x in the case of village green) is valuable cleanup work fully
> comparable to fixing typos. Without patient contributors silently
> performing routine housekeeping like that, our database would be even
> more messy than it already is.

I didn't complain about that.  I agree that some regularization is
fine, esp. from tags that are all of

  changing from undocumented to documented.

  changing from uncommon to significant weight in taginfo

  obvious to the locals in the country being changed the the replacement
  tag is better

That's why I said "99.5% of mappers think it's obviously a fix".  If
that's true, no need to discuss.

Another valuable thing to do would be to look at the tails of taginfo
and find things that have 2 uses, and look at them and pick more common
tags that are equally descriptive.  That's very hard if you are not
local.  So it would be cool to have a query that says "show me tags that
are globally odd that occur in some area", so local data stewards could
do local cleanup.  (I have been adjusting
recreation_ground/nature_reserve tags around me, but they are in areas
I've hiked through.)

Thanks - I think this is a useful discussion.
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