[Tagging] RFC: Removal of Eruvs from OSM, and further boundry=religious

[Kevin Kenny]

On Tue, Sep 6, 2022 at 8:44 AM Frederik Ramm <frederik at remote.org> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> On 06.09.22 11:58, Greg Troxel wrote:
> > Having eruvs in OSM is not our big problem.   I think deletionism in
> > general is far more serious, especially because it tends to drive away
> > contributors.
>
> Citation needed, and I object to your labeling as "deletionism" the
> legitimate question of what belongs in OSM and what doesn't.
>
> I believe that new contributors are just as easily driven away by having
> to navigate too much data that is fully outside their area of expertise.
>
> Someone who wants to map a building and encounters a tree will be able
> to deal with that. But someone splitting a centre line of the river
> Rhine and being asked "are you sure you want to edit these 5 religious
> boundaries" or - in case their editor just does it "automatically" -
> being later asked by another mapper "why did you make an edit to this
> religious boundary in this changeset" might very well conclude that OSM
> is too difficult for them.
>
> And I don't - as I mentioned in my "Layers" post - think that this is
> purely a technical issue ("make the software better and the problem goes
> away"). I *want* someone making an edit to actively contemplate the
> consequences, and this puts an upper limit on the amount of niche
> interest data we can accept.
>
> If something is really *so* unrelated to the rest of OSM that it can be
> edited without regard to other things in OSM, then have someone set up
> their own OSM for that.
>

This is now moving the goalpost. The initial argument was that eruvim are
not verifiable in the field.  They are.  A Jew who observes both the Law
and his surroundings can identify them, and a rabbinical community will
ordinarily inspect them weekly to be sure that they are undamaged, because
a broken eruv isn't an eruv at all. (An eruv is a symbolic boundary fence -
if the fence isn't continuous, the boundary is broken.)

Eruvim will, as a general rule, interact with their surroundings, since a
common marking for an eruv is a wire or cord strung on utility poles. (And
we surely do map utility poles; I've divorced a lot of them from being
glued to objects that are not part of the utility infrastructure.)

I came to OpenStreetMap because it allows for mapping some of _my_ special
interests integrated with objects of general interest or of others' special
interests.  If we adopt a policy of "no niche interest data", I shan't have
much motivation to stick around. And I don't want to have to present a case
continually that the objects I map are 'interesting enough', or 'verifiable
enough.'

-- 
73 de ke9tv/2, Kevin
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/tagging/attachments/20220906/056c93e3/attachment-0001.htm>