[Talk-GB] Ungluing landuse, adding detail (was: Re: traffic island mapping / harmful detail?)

[Andy Townsend]

On 04/04/2021 10:46, Frederik Ramm wrote:
>
> There is a wide consensus that two adjacent landuse areas should share 
> the same nodes (or even be relations with a common way member), and 
> that if there is a thing of very small width between the two, like a 
> fence, it can also share these nodes. If the thing that separates them 
> becomes as wide as a proper road, then most mappers advocate letting 
> the road and both areas left and right of it have their own sets of 
> nodes, with a little bit of "nothing" in between.
>
>
I think that 99% of the time that I end up "ungluing" landuse is where I 
need to add something else to the separation between the two.  Perhaps 
they were joined at a ditch, and I want to add a hedge one side of the 
ditch.  Sometimes there's a track one side of the ditch, and on the 
other side of that is a fence.

To me this is just a natural consequence of adding detail.  The aerial 
imagery available even a few years ago didn't support that, and OSM has 
always evolved in this way - someone has a rough go at something, and 
someone later improves on that.  I'd suggest that that detail is only 
"harmful" if it goes beyond what is discernable from survey or from the 
imagery used.  We used to get a fair bit of that in the very old days - 
people using NPE maps to add features in the wrong places or Yahoo 
imagery to add things that were something else entirely.  We don't get 
that now because better sources are available.

I don't think that verifiable extra detail is "harmful", though it may 
go far beyond what I as a mapper would ever be interested in adding.  
Personally I almost never add house numbers and rarely add buildings, 
and I'm sure that I add detail that other people really can't be 
bothered to - this doesn't mean that either of us is wrong, it's just 
how OSM has always worked.

Best Regards,

Andy