[Talk-us] name expansion bot (Re: Imports information on the wiki)

[Paul Johnson]

On Fri, Feb 17, 2012 at 12:02 AM, Alan Mintz
<Alan_Mintz+OSM at earthlink.net>wrote:

> At 2012-01-15 05:35, Mike N wrote:
>
>> On 1/15/2012 8:28 AM, Nathan Edgars II wrote:
>>
>>> Actually the script also expanded the W to West. But my point is that it
>>> is a TIGER entry error, and any future script needs to take into account
>>> that these exist and people may have already fixed them to the correct
>>> names.
>>>
>>
>>  Agreed- if we're thinking of a bot that periodically fixes everything,
>> we need a special tag that says "abbreviation_bot=back_off" (but perhaps
>> not so verbose) - something that tells the bot not to touch the name
>> because it is unusual and has been manually checked.
>>
>
> I hope there is no such bot being contemplated again. The last one created
> lots of issues.


Sounds like it would be better to come up with a more comprehensive
algorithm for the bot, not outright deny the need for it altogether.
 Granted, it did make minor messes in Oregon (where names with "St."
meaning "Saint," "Santa/o" or "Sainte" are slightly more common) and
Oklahoma (where single-letter street names are slightly more common), but
overall, the automation saved countless hours of manual name expansion for
the minor cost of having to deal with a very small number of largely
regionally-isolated edge cases.
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://lists.openstreetmap.org/pipermail/talk-us/attachments/20120217/9081fbf0/attachment.html>