[Tagging] [OSM-talk] Should we map things that do not exist?

[Mateusz Konieczny]

May 25, 2020, 09:47 by dieterdreist at gmail.com:

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> sent from a phone
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>> On 25. May 2020, at 08:54, Colin Smale <colin.smale at xs4all.nl> wrote:
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>> 1. Live and let live - OSM has always been a broad church. It might not be your hobby, but it is their's. The bar to actively deleting other people's work should be set very high indeed.
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> +1
> I completely subscribe to this 
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+1, but something that is 100% gone can be deleted.

I have seen railway=abandoned mapped across open-pit mine that was there for 20 years.

There was zero chance of mappers recreating it (as oldest aerials will show open pit mine),
it was 100% gone (like embankments, railway station and dirt 20 m below).

I deleted it.

Something that is fully, completely and totally gone can be deleted. If there are buildings
across former track of the railway and embankment is leveled then it can and should
be deleted.

If there are no traces whatsoever and you need old maps to map it then it is out of
scope of OSM and deleting it improves OpenStreetMap.

There was railway here:
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:National_Museum_in_Krakow-Main_Building,_1,_3Maja_Av,_Krakow,Poland.jpg

There are no traces whatsoever. It is not mapped, should not be mapped and
should be deleted if mapped.

I have more doubts about cases where only earthworks remain (and are used for
cycleway/road/path). You can plausibly guess that railway was there but it is just a
guess and typically you need old maps to confirm that it was there.

And in some cases such features look like former railway but that is not really true.

But something that is totally gone should be gone from OpenStreetMap (with exceptions
for objects marked as gone and temporarily not deleted to prevent incorrect remapping).

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