[Tagging] Proposed mechanical edit: surface=soil to surface=dirt

[Andy Townsend]

On 31/08/15 11:33, Mateusz Konieczny wrote:
> On Mon, 31 Aug 2015 10:35:24 +0100
> "ajt1047 at gmail.com" <ajt1047 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> There are 32 in the UK, by only 2 mappers (both still active but
>> edits are from many years ago).  Extrapolating that there have only
>> been probably only 25 mappers using this tag worldwide.
> Is there some method to automate finding who introduced tags? Doing it
> manually would not be worth the effort. On the other hand - running
> script to detect users (and/or relevant changesets) may be a good idea.

I'm not aware of any existing tools to do it, but that doesn't mean that 
there aren't any.  It does sound like something that could be automated 
(either on a per-way basis or a per-tag basis, though that sounds like 
it would need access to data from a full-history planet).  However it's 
just taken me longer to reply to this email than it did to find out 
where the examples in the UK came from, so in the case of very small 
usages like this finding the "full story" behind a tag needn't take long. :)

It may not be the case here (too few examples), but often any check of a 
particular tag will find "obviously garbage" values, or values that at 
first look don't make sense, until it clicks what the original mapper 
was really trying to record, and in such cases the answer might not be 
"dirt" but something else altogether.

Cheers,

Andy (SomeoneElse)

PS - as expected the ones in the UK do look like exact synonyms for 
"dirt" - I'm not sure I've ever walked any of the "soil" ones SE of 
Nottingham but I've certainly walked plenty of adjacent ones and would 
say those were "dirt".