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

[andrzej zaborowski]

On 15 January 2012 14:35, Mike N <niceman at att.net> 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.

Running a bot periodically would be a really bad idea IMHO.  Even if
you add such a tag, the average mapper is not going to know about it.
An edit war between an unsuspecting human and a script is something
that shouldn't happen even if the mapper turns out to be wrong.

It only makes sense where there's a huge import that has simply not
considered the abbreviations.  Such an import will also affect what
first-time local mappers think is the agreed way of doing things in
OSM so imho it made sense to do a one-time name expansion over all
highways.

Cheers