[Talk-GB] Mass edits of landuse /natural tags

[Matt Williams]

On 25 April 2013 16:23, John Baker <rovastar at hotmail.com> wrote:
> To be honest I am struggling to see anything wrong with what I have done.
> Let take grass in your example Jerry.
>
> There are always more suitable tags than natural=grass, landuse=grass being
> the most obvious there is also natural=grasslands as was pointed out by Tom.
> I am aware of these. I am surprised at the assumption that I am not.
>
> Now I said I did not update if there was an existing tag. So for
> landuse=farmland I left it.
>
> But if there was no existing landuse tag what is the harm?
>
> Even if a soccer pitch was changed from natural=grass to landuse=grass what
> is wrong with that? It still states in the tag that is is grass. It was
> tagged "wrong" to being with as it should be surface=grass but now it will
> be tagged slightly less "wrong" as it is at least following some standards.
>
> None of the cases mention I can see that I did any harm.

The potential for harm arises from your assumption that some tags are
implicitly more wrong than others. natural=grass and landuse=grass are
not the same thing. One has not replaced the other. On a case-by-case
basis, one might be more correct than the other but it's plain silly
to say that 'landuse' is de jure more correct than 'natural'.

Your later talk of 'RFCs in the wiki' shows you don't understand the
subtleties of the OSM tagging schema and the way we choose what tags
to use where. This makes me very dubious about you running scripts to
'correct' anything.

Matt