[Talk-GB] Advice please: Goat tracks in mountain areas

[David Woolley]

On 06/02/2022 13:05, Martin Wynne wrote:
> There must surely be a short section of it where it becomes very 
> indistinct on the ground? If not, perhaps you could create one on site? 
> You can then remove that section from the route - no such path exists. 
> If the path is a genuine hazard to life and limb it would be a laudable 
> way to spend an afternoon with a shovel.

If a path being a hazard to life were a condition for exclusion, you 
would also need to remove 
<https://www.openstreetmap.org/way/518618562#map=16/27.9857/86.9264&layers=C>! 
  I think many lives have been lost on this one.  (I've used the cycle 
layer because it has contours.)

The only circumstance in which I might consider it legitimate to self 
censor OSM would be where national security was involved (and it seems 
to me that some people actually go out of their way to collect national 
infrastructure, which would become high priority targets for sabotage or 
air strikes).

Even then I would note that, when Fylingdales was active, the paper maps 
had "undefined" printed over the approximate location, so I would 
probably want an OSM area type for marking areas of the map where 
information had been suppressed.

Also, people have compared OSM with OS maps, but I think they are 
comparing OSM with the OS printed maps at 1:25,000 upwards.  The correct 
comparison is with OS Master Map, which is the underlying database.  I 
don't know if Master Map includes the features being discussed here.

If Strava is displaying routes only suitable for technical climbers, as 
though they were suitable for Sunday strollers, that weakness in Strava 
needs to publicised.  OSM needs to protect itself by ensuring that the 
true difficulty is encoded, and possibly consider distinguishing such 
paths in the standard rendering.