[Talk-GB] UK Rights of Way - WikiProject

[Andrew Chadwick]

On 02/05/12 12:38, Peter Rounce wrote:
> In view of recent interest in UK rights of way, should we set up a wiki
> project, possibly at:
> http://wiki.openstreetmap.org/wiki/WikiProject_United_Kingdom/RightsOfWay
> 
> It would seem to be a good addition to the current UK projects.

Are you planning to organise this? Thanks!

One caveat re the organisation. There's no such thing as a "UK right of
way". There are Scottish ones, NI ones, and England-and-Wales ones; all
somewhat different. Do you intend to cover them all?

Since long-distance footpaths and Sustrans paths have their own
projects, perhaps the high-level multi-country/county networks are
already spoken for.  Still, I've no objection to an umbrella UK-wide
group for PRoWs of all kinds, provided someone states what the general
goals of the project should be, and how its existence would contribute
to the map database.

One project goal might be to consolidate the various scattered
information on the wiki describing how to map RoWs in the first place.
Come up with *one* consensus approach. We seem to be settling on
designation=* + highway={foot,cycle,bridle}way, by the looks of it (full
disclosure; it's the approach I'm cheerleading).

We could certainly do with more research and write-ups of RoWs for each
of the four countries. Classification work, photos of the sorts of
signage and paths a mapper might encounter. Everything right now is
*very* England-centric, and this ought to be addressed and organised in
terms of practical activities ("go out and get me better pictures",
"somebody research what a West Hebridean surrey-with-a-fringe-on-topway
is, please").

It would be good to write up how mappers should and should not use old,
OOC sources like NPE to enter "rights of way" - which didn't exist at
the time, but the NPE and other OS publications probably were used as
the first definitive maps for drawing them up.  FWIW, I'm suggesting
highway=path and *nothing more specific* for an NPE "bridleway or track
or path", provided Bing concurs.  Also strongly suggest encouraging
users to get out and map them properly (... hippy ...), acknowledging
the limitations of armchair mapping.

But fundamentally, OSM is about the database and not its wiki. Is there
anything that can be done to coordinate while encouraging people to get
out and map missing or bad data systematically? Mapping parties,
meetups, for example. If yes, then the project page is probably a good
idea. If no, it's just more wikifiddling and probably a waste of time in
the long run. We already have people working on documentation
improvement, and from experience it's *horribly* easy to get hung up on
RoW nonsense without getting anything useful done...

-- 
Andrew Chadwick