[Talk-GB] Toys R Us

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

On 05/04/2018 09:10 PM, Brian Prangle wrote:
> When will it be  appropriate to do a mechanical edit and remove the 47
> instances of this store that can be seen in Overpass? Have they all
> closed now?  My local one is now closed and leaving a large gap on its
> retail  park

<usual litany>

Obviously-outdated POIs are the standard user interface for maps to
signal their age and quality. If you take a paper map today, and it
features a chain restaurant that you know went out of business five
years ago, you immediately have an idea of how old/trustworthy the rest
of the map is.

OSM can benefit from this same mechanism. Leave the Toys R Us-es in
place until a local mapper re-surveys the area which might include
mapping any number of other nearby POIs, updating opening times, and
whatnot.

It is easy to run a script that removes all the Toys R Us-es, but that
script would also destroy the valuable information that this general
area of the map hasn't been updated since Toys R Us went bankrupt.

If you could run a script that truly updates the map in the area that
would be another thing, but you cannot; you can only run a script that
removes the obvious "this map is outdated" marker. That might make the
map *look* more current but actually it isn't - the script would just be
window dressing.

</usual litany>

Bye
Frederik

-- 
Frederik Ramm  ##  eMail frederik at remote.org  ##  N49°00'09" E008°23'33"