[Tagging] Wild changes to wiki pages changing the cycleway tagging scheme

"Christian Müller" cmue81 at gmx.de
Fri Mar 15 17:51:10 UTC 2019


Let's do some research how "cycleway:left=opposite_lane"
entered the Bicycle wiki documentation.  The relevant edit
was made in June 2013 [1].

Before that, Bicycle documentation has lived 5 years
from its incarnation without recommending opposite_lane
in combination with cycleway:left or cycleway:right.

But its more intriguing /how/ the change was made. It
did not enter as an addition, but it rather changed a
recommendation that had previously looked like

{{Tag|cycleway|:=left||lane}} + {{Tag|oneway|:=bicycle||no}}

This lacks the explicit cycleway:left:oneway=-1, but apart
from that is in sync with the changes I have done on 13/03/19.
It shows that my edit has indeed been far more conservative
than what most people involved in the current discussion seem
to realize.

See [2] to find the full state the documentation has been in
for cases M3a and M3b at the end of June 2013, before the tag
cycleway:left=opposite_lane entered the page and diluted the
value set for that key.  [2] had still recommended/favoured
legacy cycleway=* over cycleway:{left,right}=*, which means
[1] did not only introduce "opposite_lane" as a value but also
moved the recommendation flag from the legacy alternative to
the suffixed variants.


At the beginning of July 2013 there were about 370 uses of
cycleway:left=opposite_lane according to [3], an overpass
attic query.  These uses piled up from 37 ways using the tag
at the beginning of 2012 [4].  To judge the growth rate one
has to put this in relation to the documented method in this
time period, given by [2].

These findings suggest, that the author of [1] based his/her
documentation change on empirical research on the data.  If
370 uses out-weighed the previous tagging scheme documented
at that time is in doubt, but at least we can state with
confidence that the wiki documentation did not change prior
to employment of the tag in the data.


Regards,
cmuelle8


[1] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Bicycle&diff=next&oldid=920716
[2] https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/w/index.php?title=Bicycle&oldid=920716
[3] http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/H1U
[4] http://overpass-turbo.eu/s/H1W
 
 

> On 15/3/19, 15:34, Mateusz Konieczny wrote:
> 
> Is it originally documented as open list,
> inheriting cycleway values, excluding
> some cycleway values, closed list
> or left unclear?
> 
> If left unclear then I would not assume that
> all agree with me.



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