[Talk-us] note to abbreviation bot authors

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 16 May 2011 17:56, Richard Welty <rwelty at averillpark.net> wrote:
> On 5/16/11 11:10 AM, andrzej zaborowski wrote:
>>
>> On 16 May 2011 06:09, Richard Welty<rwelty at averillpark.net>  wrote:
>>>
>>> i recently spent some quality time doing tiger review in a community
>>> that has a rather straightforward naming system for its avenues.
>>> it starts with A Avenue to the south and steps through the alphabet
>>> as the avenues appear to the north.
>>>
>>> a de-abbreviation bot had been run on the area.
>>>
>>> it should most assuredly _not_ have "corrected" E Ave to East Avenue,
>>> nor should it have "corrected" N Ave to North Avenue.
>>>
>>> please be careful with these things, folks.
>>
>> Yes, the bot tried to use direction prefix tag to distinguish between
>> E as a letter and E for East and it turned out to be wrong in the 2006
>> data way too often.
>
> i'm not sure i'm following this. there are no prefix tags that i can see
> on the ways in question:
>
> http://www.openstreetmap.org/browse/way/16034490

Ironically this one looks like a manual edit (or at least it doesn't
have a bot=yes tag on the changeset and it's more localised than bot
edits tend to be), and it's in Iowa where the automated expansion has
not been run.

So this particular one is a counter example to the "don't run bots,
leave it to be done manually" rule :)  I also think that large imports
are a special case because the tagging is already a result of
automated processing by the import script, and if you want to fix it
you can't really count on users having a sense of "onwership" /
"maintainership" of the whole area.

Cheers