[Talk-GB] [OSM-talk] Improving ref=* documentation

[Frederik Ramm]

Hi,

when I said "not making up ref values" I was thinking of a recent 
example in Austria where some mappers thought "hey wouldn't it be nice 
if this national cycleway which does not have an official short 
reference showed up on the cyclemap as XXX" and proceeded to add ref=XXX 
to the cycleway relation.

I think that in general, any "ref" values we put in the database must 
mirror an already existing scheme of referencing things, and should 
never be a scheme that we thought would make sense.

What to do in cases where an official scheme does exist, but has been 
shoddily executed so that some on-the-ground things now bear signs with 
different ref numbers than some official database, is not something I 
have made a statement about - whether OSM chooses to map the sign on the 
ground or the official value from some database, in neither case would 
OSM be "making up" a ref number.

I would lean towards mapping what's on the ground, rather than what 
"should be on the ground". The workings of the authorities can be arcane 
and when there's a discrepancy between what you see on the ground and 
what the gov't has in their database, how would you know if maybe the 
database just hasn't been updated yet, or is subject to a legal appeal, 
or whatnot.

We've had cases in Germany where a city council had decided to rename a 
street, but before they could change the street signs, there was a legal 
appeal against the decision (which technically was in force until the 
appeal was ultimately successful). By sticking to what was on the signs, 
we avoided having to closely follow the exact legal situation at each 
point in time, which, since the courts were busy with the whole thing, 
would surely not have been trivial.

But, believe it or not, there has recently been a case from the US where 
a local resident petitioned OSM to fix the name of a street, which was 
misspelled in OSM, claiming that the name was misspelled on the street 
sign as well, and the authorities were refusing to change the street 
sign due to the name being spelled the same on OSM. Then soon after we 
made the change, the resident thanked OSM and said, finally the 
authorities had now fixed the sign as well. I think someone was taking 
the piss. But maybe not...

Bye
Frederik

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