[Tagging] Rio de la Plata edit war

[Alan Mackie]

Has this edit war stabilised?

Apparently it has been blocking coastline updates across the whole world
for *months *now.

https://osmdata.openstreetmap.de/data/land-polygons.html
https://github.com/fossgis/osmdata/issues/7


On Mon, 13 Jan 2020 at 11:40, Christoph Hormann <osm at imagico.de> wrote:

> On Monday 13 January 2020, Frederik Ramm wrote:
> >
> > According to Wikipedia, the International Hydrographic Organization
> > defines the eastern boundary of the Río de la Plata as "a line
> > joining Punta del Este, Uruguay and Cabo San Antonio, Argentina",
> > which is what has been the case in OSM until now:
>
> That is a straw man argument that has been floated already at the very
> beginning when a riverbank polygon was first created for that (which
> was later than when the Río de la Plata was originally mapped by the
> way - just to clarify that).
>
> The IHO specifies an (obviously subjective and non-verifiable) set of
> limits of *oceans and seas*.  If anyone wants to use this as an
> argument that would make the Río de la Plata a marginal sea of the
> Atlantic Ocean and therefore to be placed outside the coastline.  So
> using the IHO as a source (in lieu of the verifiable geography in a
> Wikipedia-like fashion so to speak) kind of defeats the basic argument
> for the Río de la Plata to not be a maritime waterbody.
>
> > This current representation in OSM leads to a few strange situations
> > especially in toolchains/map styles that use different colours for
> > inland water and oceans, or that draw sea depths, or just highlight
> > the coastline. Buenos Aires, according to OSM, is currently not a
> > coastal city.
>
> The main reason why the current mapping is vigorously maintained by some
> local mappers is political in nature.  Argentina and Uruguay want to
> claim this area as internal waters (and the administrative boundaries
> are mapped accordingly) but not every other nation accepts this claim.
> Presenting the Río de la Plata as a non-maritime waterbody in as many
> maps and data sets as possible would support such claim.
>
> My own solution as a data user to this has been to simply maintain a
> coastline cheatfile which marks this as a special case and moves the
> Río de la Plata polygon into the ocean polygon data.  This is
> unfortunate but way simpler than trying to fight against a widespread
> politically motivated conviction.  See also:
>
> https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Tag:maritime=yes
>
> > I'm not so clear about how to interpret the wiki page myself when it
> > comes to river mouths. There's a clarifying proposal here
> > https://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/Proposed_Features/Coastline-River
> >_transit_placement but this is still at the proposal stage.
>
> The IMO logical approach to placing the closing segment of the coastline
> at a river mouth according to the spirit of the OpenStreetMap project
> is to place it where for the verifiable view of humans the maritime
> domain ends and the riverine domain starts.  This is largely an
> ecological question.  Coastline and riverbanks are physical geography
> features so their position is to be defined by physically observable
> characteristics rather than politically defined limits.  Like so often
> (for example in case of the line between scrubland and woodland) this
> is often not a clearly visible sharp line but a transit.  There are
> however clearly observable limits to the extent of this transit.  The
> proposal cited tries to specify those.
>
> Back when i drafted the proposal there was very little interest in the
> subject except by those who were opposed to it for political reasons.
> Therefore i did not pursue it further.  But anyone is welcome to take
> it up again.
>
> --
> Christoph Hormann
> http://www.imagico.de/
>
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