[Talk-us] Merging NYC buildings

[Paul Norman]

On 9/19/2014 7:00 AM, Bryan Housel wrote:
> We really should come up with a good way to make authoritative data 
> harder to edit in the various editors.
All that a particular data source can be authoritative for is what that 
data source says something is. What is authoritative for OSM is the 
ground truth.

That's not to say that there aren't features that would be difficult to 
improve in accuracy. The Canada-US border on the west coast comes to 
mind. It's pieced together from multiple observations and data sources 
and it's unlikely someone could improve it's accuracy, but the 
possibility remains there.

The idea of some tag to "lock" objects from normal editing because they 
are "authoritative" has occasionally been proposed, and to summarize the 
discussion, it's extremely unlikely to happen.